Blog censorship?
When I logged in yesterday, I found two notices about posts being "unpublished" or put behind a warning because they violated the "community guidelines". Today a third notice appeared. Here they are:
I did some checking and was able to find only one post that had been tampered with -- a post from 2011 about lesbians in Ecuador being subjected to conversion therapy. I can't imagine any reason it would have run afoul of "community guidelines". Perhaps a glitchy algorithm just flagged it at random. At any rate, I clicked "request review" and I'll see what happens.
As to the other two notices, I can't find anything else missing or otherwise tampered with, but I have more than four thousand posts and it's impossible to individually review them all. If anyone notices anything missing or hidden on my blog, please e-mail me. I'd also be curious whether anyone else has had the same problem recently.
Or perhaps all three notices refer to the same post. At any rate, if Blogspot is suddenly going on a censorship jag, it may once again be time to consider migrating to Substack or some other platform where non-censorship of content is guaranteed.
Update: I just checked an e-mail account I didn't realize was linked to this blog, and found notifications about seven posts being censored due to the same "community guidelines" crap, all during an hour-and-a-half period last night. Besides the Ecuador post, they included five link round-ups and one of my "improving words" joke definition posts. All of them were several years old. I clicked "request review" on all of them. Which posts got censored seems to be completely random, so I'm hoping it was indeed an algorithm glitch, but this does look bad.
Update 2 (10:20 PM): I got follow-up e-mails from Blogspot that all seven of the censored posts were reinstated. So I guess it really was just a glitchy algorithm.
I did some checking and was able to find only one post that had been tampered with -- a post from 2011 about lesbians in Ecuador being subjected to conversion therapy. I can't imagine any reason it would have run afoul of "community guidelines". Perhaps a glitchy algorithm just flagged it at random. At any rate, I clicked "request review" and I'll see what happens.
As to the other two notices, I can't find anything else missing or otherwise tampered with, but I have more than four thousand posts and it's impossible to individually review them all. If anyone notices anything missing or hidden on my blog, please e-mail me. I'd also be curious whether anyone else has had the same problem recently.
Or perhaps all three notices refer to the same post. At any rate, if Blogspot is suddenly going on a censorship jag, it may once again be time to consider migrating to Substack or some other platform where non-censorship of content is guaranteed.
Update: I just checked an e-mail account I didn't realize was linked to this blog, and found notifications about seven posts being censored due to the same "community guidelines" crap, all during an hour-and-a-half period last night. Besides the Ecuador post, they included five link round-ups and one of my "improving words" joke definition posts. All of them were several years old. I clicked "request review" on all of them. Which posts got censored seems to be completely random, so I'm hoping it was indeed an algorithm glitch, but this does look bad.
Update 2 (10:20 PM): I got follow-up e-mails from Blogspot that all seven of the censored posts were reinstated. So I guess it really was just a glitchy algorithm.
posted by Infidel753 at 9:17 AM
10 Comments:
I can't think of or remember any of your posts that should be censored. Unless there is some holier-than-thou tight-assed Christian bitch who thinks anything about lesbians or anything gay in content should be reported and did just that. Really, why can't people just move along and leave everyone alone.
Considering that I see things like hardcore pornography or calls for the killing of government officials on some Blogspot blogs, and that never gets taken down, I can't imagine why anything of mine would. I'm hoping it's just an algorithm that got triggered by some combination of key words.
If there's any way to download your content, now would be a good time.
I went through this, lost stuff. Could be innocent, as you say; could be some "tight-ass" who doesn't like what you say ... and found a way to shut you down. Never did figure out what was "offensive."
Silver-lining: I registered my own domain, solved the problem ...
Hopefully it's just a glitch. I was going to say the same thing you said in a comment about seeing porn on blogs and they get to stay up so yours should be fine.
Dang - I hope you get to the bottom of it.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you that it's just a glitch in the algorithm.
I guess all's well that ends well.....
I think it's dodgy algorithms. I recall a deep AI they were training to idenrtify and classify melanomas. The pictures they fed it all had rulers next to the suspected lesion. They wound up training an AI to recognise rulers. This is a serious problem with deep learning AI techniques. They never really show their working. They'll give an answer but you never get an explanation of their "reasoning". You get an answer without an explanation.
I've encountered some similar things over the years. Sometimes it is a glitch, and it sounds like that was the case here. Sometimes it is malicious and happens because someone who visits your blog is upset by something they see and decides to punish you. Unfortunately, those efforts are often successful. What I've learned is not to get too attached to any one post.
be careful remember when they took yellowdoggranny down because they said I was sending spam..took me over a month to get her back..stupid blogger.
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