Reprinted with permission from Ryan

Minutes after posting the commentary on the NBC news article about Apple (post prior to this one), my blog became “suspended”.

I didn’t know what was going on, so I assumed I had been cancelled again, like Reddit, where if you post anything anywhere some special snowflake decides (often through a bot designed to sniff out no no words) that you should be banned.

Automattic (WordPress.com) refuses to say what led to the ban, but it’s quite obvious through my history of posts about Apple’s censorship, proprietary software, the Microsoft Stabber, etc. that there are probably outfits that would rather that I just go away and not come back.

Automattic says that there’s no robot going around killing blogs without human review, but beyond this, I have no idea and I’ll never be able to prove anything.

Things became a little more complicated when I went ahead and shut down my account, and then someone suggested I should appeal the ban.

I think I’ve been on the “modern” Internet too long where people just silently “murder” your account with a gun pressed up to a pillow and was just no longer thinking in terms of “You can appeal this and there’s actually going to be someone that considers it.”, because again, Reddit.

I deleted my account at Reddit a while back because I was running into issues where I would say something like “That’s crazy!” in response to something incredulous and I would get banned, by a bot, which said “You said crazy, and crazy is an ableist term!” *spank spank spank*

Combined with the fact that Reddit just went and handed over tons of data about some users on one of its forums to a copyright troll didn’t help all of this go down much better. It got me thinking, you know, if you browse around, they’re watching you. Logging you. Would it not be best if they didn’t have that data?

So I’ve been increasingly “disconnecting” from proprietary “social” media, because it’s all rather bullshit anyway, full of trolls and creepy companies.

After this run in with Automattic I’m seriously considering just backing up this entire blog and self-hosting so that nobody else can “complain”.

You know, the whole thing about “You violated the terms!” Oh, what terms? “TERMS!”

Apparently this is just how Automattic rolls.

And why should we be surprised in this day and age? ⬆