A canary in the censorship coal mine

One of the right-wing blogs I've been reading to keep up with wingnut "thinking" is Vox Popoli (sic), which until recently was, as my own blog is, on the Google Blogger platform.  It's certainly one of the more "out there" blogs I've seen, a veritable encyclopedia of talking points against the covid-19 vaccines, and also regularly promoting militant Christian nationalism, stolen-election stuff, an obsessive hostility to "boomers", and anti-Jewish conspiratardia, though the latter was more pervasive in the comment threads than in the posts.  Still, it is necessary to know what the enemy is saying, unfiltered and in their own words, and the sample must include some of the more radical.  The blog does have a substantial following, judging by the comment threads, which routinely exceeded 100 comments in length.

A couple of days ago, though, Vox Popoli's URL started re-directing to this (click to enlarge):

More recently the warning message has changed to "under review for possible Blogger Terms of Service violations", so it's possible it may be restored -- but that may not matter.  In less than a day, a replacement blog was up, also called "Vox Popoli" (still misspelled) but not hosted on Google Blogger.  The original blog's posts -- almost 18 years' worth of them -- carried over, though their comment threads didn't.

On the one hand, a lot of the content over there was pretty repulsive.  On the other hand, the existence and appeal of such content is part of the reality we need to be aware of, and I was very annoyed when the blog was initially rendered unviewable.  I'm grown up and I don't need anybody telling me what I can and can't read.  More fundamentally, the Chomsky quote above expresses a core value of mine.  Support for free expression of opinion must be content-neutral, or it's meaningless.

In response to the predictable "the First Amendment only applies to the government, blah blah blah," notice that I'm not talking about the First Amendment here, but about freedom of expression of opinion as a general principle, above and beyond any one law in just one country which defends it (imperfectly, as is the case with all laws).  Yes, Google Blogger is a private entity which has the legal right to refuse to host content it objects to, but if you're going to run a platform for bloggers at all, you really need to bend over backwards to be as tolerant as you possibly can.  The nature of blogging demands it.

(Note that I do not know the specific trigger which caused Blogger to suddenly crack down after 18 years.  I suppose it's possible that Vox Popoli posted something not qualifying as free expression of opinion, such as clear-cut threats against a specific individual -- but I've seen no sign of that.)

I'm also very conscious of the fact that there are people out there who would very much like to see me silenced, and I suppose it's possible they may succeed someday, one way or another.  And if you have a blog, then believe me, the same is almost certainly true of you.  Unless your posted content is totally innocuous and never discusses anything remotely controversial or potentially offensive to anyone (and perhaps even then), there's somebody out there who considers it an outrageous injustice that you're allowed to say what you think.

So we should all actually be glad that Vox Popoli was able to create a work-around relatively quickly.  I gather some substantial preparation was involved.  Be aware that you may someday need to do the same.

[Reminder -- I don't allow comments which try to support or justify censorship (explanation here).  It's the principle of the thing.]