Prepare for the Great Decoupling – Deplatforming moves downstream to WordPress.com and Mailchimp
The unrelenting deplatforming pressure from the left leaves non-leftists no choice but to prepare for decoupling on our own terms.
In the past day there have been two very disturbing developments in internet deplatforming.
We are all familiar with deplatforming from major social media services such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as those platforms outright silencing important news that harms Democrats, like the Biden family influence peddling scandal. Twitter regularly now places notices or restrictions even on Trump’s tweet on the allegation that his opinions on the election are disputed. In the four years Trump as been the subject of dishonest and malicious conspiracy claims, particularly Russia collusion, I can’t remember Twitter ever placing such restrictions on the tweets from Adam Schiff, other Democrat politicians, or mainstream media outlets peddling that disinformation.
The two recent developments take it to a new level.
First, The Conservative Treehouse website says it received notification from WordPress.com that “… given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”
WordPress.com should not be confused with the WordPress website software. WordPress.com is a hosting platform owned by Automattic:
Automattic owns and operates WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of the open source WordPress software with added features for security, speed and support. Please append “.com” when referencing our product name.
WordPress is open source software, which is written, maintained, and supported by thousands of independent contributors worldwide. Automattic is a major contributor to the WordPress open source project.
Legal Insurrection uses WordPress software, but we are not hosted by WordPress.com.
I have emailed Automattic asking them to confirm or deny the story as related by the Treehouse, but have received no response. This form of deplatforming is particularly troubling. Longtime readers may recall that one of the main reasons we left Google Blogger (blogspot.com) in 2011 was fear of being deplatformed by Google.
Two and one-half years later, after almost 8 million visits and 10 million page views, I’m moving away from Blogger. I made the decision even before the Big Blogger Blackout of 2011, but that event confirmed my view that I no longer was comfortable relying on the goodwill of Google.
We are now self-hosted, but retain the fear that our host could turn out the lights on a whim or more likely, under some sort of political pressure. We back up the website off-platform every night, and have been assured by our tech team that we would be up and running elsewhere quickly if that were to happen.
But what if that “elsewhere” refused to take us under the same pressure. If we were a left-wing website, we would have no such worries because leftists almost never get deplatformed. At least WordPress.com gave the Treehouse notice, but the chilling effect is there. Not only do non-leftists risk deplatforming on Twitter and Facebook, now it’s moved to hosting services.
Second, the Northern Virginia Tea Party has been deplatformed by Mailchimp, as Luke Rosiak reports:
Mailchimp, a common email delivery service, has refused to provide service to the Northern Virginia Tea Party, citing that it violates their terms of agreement about “potential… misinformation.” It had attempted to notify members about a recount rally.
Mailchimp, a common email delivery service, has refused to provide service to the Northern Virginia Tea Party, citing that it violates their terms of agreement about "potential… misinformation." It had attempted to notify members about a recount rally. pic.twitter.com/o156shaKq9
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) November 16, 2020
We used to use Mailchimp for our Morning Insurrection newsletter. We switched to Salsa Labs for reasons unrelated to Mailchimp itself (Salsa Labs integrates many functions into one platform, including donations). While I worried about being deplatformed by Google Blogger, I never even considered that an email service like Mailchimp would review the content of our newsletters and refuse service because it disapproved of our opinions (as opposed to using the service for an illegal purpose).
Deplatforming is moving downstream when two of the best-known and largest hosting and email marketing services start censoring users who otherwise are conducting lawful business on their platforms.
Non-leftists (notice, I didn’t say “conservatives”) need to prepare to decouple. The creation of Parler, funded by conservative Rebekka Mercer, is the future. We need our own platforms, and we need to decouple on our own terms.
There needs to be a place to go. We’re at Parler, and in two months have amassed over 200,000 followers, by contrast, we’ve been on Twitter for a decade and have been stuck a under 40,000 followers for years. We’ve also opened a platform at MeWe, as a refuge for the day when we are deplatformed by Facebook, where our “reach” has stagnated and decreased in the past couple of years. Hopefully alternative non-leftist internet platforms will continue to expand.
The unrelenting pressure from the left leaves us no choice but to prepare for decoupling on our own terms. Others should prepare for the eventuality as well.
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Comments
FB, Google, and Twitter are the indicator of the beginning of the end of Civilization.. not Global Warming… It is corrupt …
“We are now self-hosted, but retain the fear that our host could turn out the lights on a whim”
I suggest splitting LI traffic across at least two servers, hosted by different companies. Also, conseratives need to get involved in creating a conserative owned web hosting service.
These are problems but also opportunities for some courageous entrepreneurs. I would classify MeWe and Parler as disruptive endeavors that will cannibalize Facebook and Twitter.
We have ourselves to blame. We gleefully post highly principled parables about how to trap wild hogs with free fodder while slowly building a pen around them, then we sign up for free services from Google, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, whatever, without a second thought.
There still ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and there never will be.
WordPress.com’s hosting service (which is what we are talking about) is not free. The WordPress software platform is free, both in the “free beer” and the “free speech” senses, and there is no risk in using it.
wordpress.com certainly DOES have a free option.
however it is a crippled site. limited plugins allowed, limited bandwidth, limited database size, etc.
Right. And that’s not what the nuthouse has. The free hosting plan couldn’t handle a site of that size.
How dumb do you have to be to be Milhouse? Asking for a friend.
I maintain multiple blogs on their service, and they are all free. I could pay and get features I really don’t need, but I don’t. There are a lot of small, independent bloggers who do the same.
It’s been said before – when getting something for free, YOU are the product.
I view current events (senate hearings, people bailing from left wing censor sites) as the begining of the end of FB, Google, and Twitter. Parler and MeWe are a good start , we need some wealthy conservatives to fund alternative sites. Time to drop old school mentailty of media ads and go to social networks.
They really haven’t thought this through, have they!?!
Imagine if the red “fly-over” states were to de-FOOD the blue states, make them dispose of their own trash, generate their own power, pay toll for driving through / flying over blue states, etc., etc., etc. And when conservatives leave in droves and their ad revenue plummets, what then?
We can live without them because by and large, we are the producers of food, consumables, builders, repairmen, service providers, entrepreneurs.
Can they live without us? Need evidence? I give you “CHAZ”.
I’ve always been concerned about the fact that California has the shipping ports (like San Pedro in Southern CA and whatever up north). There’s so much you can extrapolate about those problems ending with the trucks that load up there and drive our products and medicines and food across at least the Westerm part of the country.
I mean, we already have https://amzn.to/36Lmbm3 !!
pay attn to railroad trade magazines, east coast ports draining a lot of the CA west ports. canadian national looking to emulate its west coast prince rupert port in the east in halifax area.
The problem with removing services from leftist areas is that as conservatives leave, so do liberals. Everyone has a threshold in regards to local policy. When something becomes too left for a liberal, they move somewhere else within their threshold, but they bring their politics with them. So places like Nevada and Arizona have become far more liberal because of the California exodus. And it seems that the left is moving further left, raising that threshold as time goes on, poisoning conservative areas. I feel like separate countries with strict immigration laws is the only viable end state.
I’ve said it countless times. As a person who spent well over 20 years in tech, I witnessed the industry turn into a hellish nightmare. I got out a couple of years ago and have watched the industry continue its trajectory to where we are today. If you were not on board with the leftist culture the best you could hope for is hostile passive aggression. Often it was and still is much worse. People who I have been telling my story to for clothes to decade are finally witnessing everything with mouth agape.
Agreed; was in the IT space since the early 90’s and had to get out. I wouldn’t recommend an IT career to any sensible person these days.
48 years here. Yup.
*close to a decade
Gab’s domain registrar is Epik.com as I recall. Gab was deplatformed by its hosting provider and Epik stepped up.
Gab was also deplatformed from an EMBED service. So they had to create their own code for embedding URLs into posts. You know, where it puts up a pretty picture and a headline with a link…
Gab has also been deplatformed from the credit card companies.
And on and on it goes.
The tech crazies believe the light at the end of the tunnel is a Harris administration so they can let loose with their plans of world domination without fear of consequences. I only hope the light is actually from the Trump train.
Only time will tell.
Okay, error there. They were deplatformed from their domain registrar company and Epik stepped up.
Servers for hosting content is another category of service, though some companies do both.
Years and years ago my wife and I decided to run our wordpress blogs on our own servers. This was prior to wordpress.com offering blogs to individuals. When WordPress did start their blog offering it was attractive in that code maintenance was taken care of by wordpress. We did not bite because we knew that they would have ultimate control over content.
There are numerous companies offering host service and you can run what ever you want as a blogging platform you choose. It has only gotten easier over the years.
Most troubling to me with the deplatforming moving downstream is something that happened sporatically in the past, particularly to the gun industry but would be devastating were it to become a mainstream tool of oppression.
This tool is the refusal of payment processors to allow online entities to accept credit card payments. Since its a business relationship, there is no legal recourse to denial of service outside of a contractual breech.
At one blow, conservative owned businesses are gone. Conservative presence on the net, gone.
Conservative or Christian charities, done.
Its coming.
There’s always short wave radio. Spreading conservative ideas may come to that.
The Fed licenses that.
so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark
Sound familiar?
Mark of The Mask you say?
could you provide what you are listed under on parler and mewe?
Parler is @LegalInsurrection I don’t use mewe…
thanks I guess I got confused when I read this
“We’ve also opened a platform at MeWe, “
That’s not Jacobson answering. Just one of the commenters here, I think.
The link above for LI’s MeWe is:
https://mewe.com/i/legalinsurrection
The old process of writing checks to pay for services or donate to a chosen cause may be making a comeback. It’s slow but not so dependent on the internet hostage takers.
A scanned check image goes directly to an account in a bank, which is how we see it happen with several businesses we interact with. For example, we give our tithe checks to the church on Sunday, the bookkeeper scans them on Monday, they hit our accounts on Tuesday – or sometimes Monday afternoon.
.
The same banks that are blocking payment processing will eventually starting running OCR on customer checks and unbanking customers writing checks to unapproved entities.
Which would be a violation of federal banking law and the 14th Amendment and Civil Rights law.
Of course, the rule of law doesn’t mean much nowadays.
It certainly wouldn’t violate the 14th amendment (which only binds the government) or the civil rights laws (it’s not discrimination on any of the grounds listed there). Which banking regulation would it violate? Is there one that requires banks to pay checks to any payee? Suppose a bank says we won’t process checks made out to the KKK, or Stormfront; do they not have that right?!
Banks are government entities: controlled and chartered.
No, they are not government entities. Every company is chartered and regulated. Even WAJ Media which runs this site. Are you claiming it’s therefore bound by the bill of rights?!
Just get away from them:
20 Best WordPress Alternatives & Competitors 2020:
https://themegrill.com/blog/wordpress-alternatives/
https://www.cmsmatrix.org/ provides a system to compare scores of different content management systems including WordPress.
URL doesn’t work.
There is a FORTUNE to be made by conservative tech entrepreneurs. Cost of startup: no more than what zuckerberg, the scumbag from Twitter spent.
Don’t confuse WordPress the software with WordPress the free hosting service. The latter is deplatforming conservatives. The former is available on hundreds of independent hosting services worldwide. Just find a hosting service anywhere that offers the WordPress package and move your site there with minimal disruption. (Don’t the Swiss have a reputation for offering such confidential services?)
I meant to type, “Just find a hosting service anywhere that offers the WordPress package and has a reputation for customer loyalty over political correctness, and move your site there with minimal disruption.” (My kingdom for an edit function.)
Not anymore they don’t.
Of course there are alternatives to WordPress, but there’s no reason to look for one if you like what you have. WordPress is completely free, as in “free speech”. (It’s also free as in “free beer”, but that’s irrelevant to this topic.) Nobody can take it away from you. LI runs on WordPress.
Saw this at the bottom of a Bitchute video:
“BitChute needs your help! We have been deplatformed by service providers and we are in the process of moving providers. If you experience an issue this is likely the cause. Please consider helping at this critical time.”
“Two and one-half years later, after almost 8 million visits and 10 million page views, I’m moving away from Blogger. I made the decision even before the Big Blogger Blackout of 2011, but that event confirmed my view that I no longer was comfortable relying on the goodwill of Google.”
I used to have a Blogger account. Still do, as far as I know, but I haven’t used it for several years. Google, like Twitter and Facebook, promotes totalitarianism, and I do not want any part of it.
Parler and Gab serve my free speech needs. I also have a Goodreads account, and I have started pushing the boundaries by writing reviews of books critical of totalitarianism. At some point I suspect my Goodreads account will get locked, but I want the satisfaction of making the Communists do their dirty work themselves rather than self-censor.
In short, there are alternatives to the Communist Borg. These can be our samizdat.
In the 90-00 people who wanted a web site did mostly one thing.
They bought a computer, got a good ethernet connection, installed a webserver set it up and boom.
Nowadays, for a site like this, you could use a Raspberry Pi4 or other SBC’s. Host videos and audio upsite, and for something around $150 you could start your own website.
I would say more, but it’s late. WordPress software is free and open source, so anyone can use it. What is needed is a turnkey solution[1]. Some discipline in making backups.
Major problems I forsee are:
1. Service providers not allowing home users to run servers. Without net neutrality it would be hard to get them to allow such.
2.You’re going to need protection from DDOS, like for example, CloudFlare and you are going to have to trust them.
3. Most people have dynamic ip addresses, which means that you need some service which maps your URL to your present IP. Not impossible or difficult, but you need some steady site setup which holds your IP address. OTOH it would be much cheaper to run then parler for example.
[1] For those that don’t know it basically means a system that takes little work to get going, basically turn a key and it goes.
“1. Service providers not allowing home users to run servers. Without net neutrality it would be hard to get them to allow such.”
Net neutrality has nothing to do with this. Even if you passed some other law to force ISPs to offer it, all you’d get is a crappy service, because ye canna repeal th’ laws o’ physics. Most residential ISPs are set up to offer fast download and merely adequate upload — it makes the service cost-effective and biases the available bandwidth towards download where people want it. But you put a server in a home and all of a sudden the upload speed is critical. And that’s why industrial internet costs more than residential internet.
Right. Comcast, for example, doesn’t care if you host a web server on your residential drop, but if you frequently exceed caps, they will call you and encourage you to stop (implied threat of cut-off) or upgrade to business service. Business service has has more upload speed available (for a price) also can have a fixed IP (for a price) which servers need to operate. (We have been running low volume servers for years using dyndns to manage the dynamic IP’s.)
no “home” isp I know of gives you a 1gb UPSTREAM bandwidth.
servers do not care about download speeds. they need upstream speed and qos.
I presume you mean 1gb/s. I doubt that the traffic from LI reaches anywhere that. I doubt that the traffic generated by LI in a year is more then a week worth of Zoom calls from a person working completely from home.
If a site generates that much traffic there are at least two solutions. I is to get a bigger plan. The other to use mirrors. I know this costs more, but at the point with the traffic so high, you tell me they can’t find a way to raise more money to support the higher traffic?
This sort of thing has already been happening for several years to people in the medical freedom movement. A movement, I might add, that I’ve seen many on here deride.
That’s because it is derisible. Just because a cause is unpopular doesn’t mean it’s worthy; generally it’s unpopular for a reason. “They laughed at Galileo; they laughed at Columbus; they laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
(By the way, Galileo and Columbus were both nuts, and those who laughed at them were rationally right to do so. They were just lucky that their crackpot theories turned out later to have been accidentally right. Actually Columbus remained wrong; the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan is what everyone said it was, and not what he insisted it was. He was just lucky that there was a continent on the way, so you didn’t have to sail all the way to Japan without resupplying. Galileo’s theory turned out to be substantially correct; it’s just that proving it turned out to be a lot harder than he thought it would be.)
Columbus was the ultimate leftist. He set sail not knowing where he was going, and arrived not knowing where he was. He left not knowing where he had been, and he did it on borrowed money.
Borrowing money is not leftist it is a very highly capitalistic endevour.
But as for the rest, you forget that Colombus when he set out went toward the left side of the map.
Hey, check your privilege — that’s a pretty septentrio-centric attitude.
The corporate censorship leads to the enforcement of a social score. China is doing this today. Your social score determines your level of opportunity. Want better housing? Want a reservation at a good restaurant? Your social score better be high enough.
Blocking non progressive thought is thought control at the highest order. Regardless if it’s big government or big tech, we are being told what is appropriate thought and who we should associate with.
Now people are beginning to understand how the frog in the slowly heating water bath feels near the end.
People have a tendency to live their lives in what I call the Magic Kingdom Bubble. Nothing bad is going to happen to them. Well, gumdrops and unicorns is not reality folks. The wold is a dangerous place made even more dangerous by the fact that human beings live there. It may be too late to wake up.
For the last 100 years, the Progressive Elite Establishment has been imposing greater levels of control upon the people of the world, including those in the US. They initially controlled the financial world, then the manufacturing world, then they broadened control of the political world, then the media. They made a few mistakes along the way; such as losing control of the internet/Worldwide Web, in its infancy. In the late 1990s, the Establishment set out to establish control over this frightening new communications medium, by funding tech companies. In fact, the only thing which has allowed a large number of the world’s citizens to remain semi-free, is the fact that the Establishment is a loose conglomeration of power people and interests who have their own agendas and sometimes work at cross purposes. Well, that has changed.
In the 2010s, a populist movement began to rise in the world. People, not being total brain-dead sheep, began to demand that their viewpoints be taken into consideration in government decision making. And, they became more and more vocal and more visible. Anarchist elements began to become visible, embedded within the larger populist movement. Populism was becoming a serious threat to the power of the Establishment. And, in 2015, with the rise of DJ Trump, it reached the tipping point for the Establishment. The Progressive Establishment went to war against the rest of civilization. And, the war went badly for them. They were forced to reveal more and more of themselves and their common agenda and even had to ally themselves with their sworn enemies, the anarchists. Now, they have had to engage in election fraud in the most powerful, most heavily armed nation on the planet and this war is about to enter a new stage; armed internal conflict.
So, going into this new phase, the Establishment has to more tightly control communications. It controls the traditional media; all of it. It controls the physical communications network, through control of telecommunication companies and the government. Now it is increasing its control over the alternative communications network, the internet. Deplatforming is only step one. If that does not work as hoped, we will see expanded control of access to individual sites, through ISPs. And, it will happen.
There are at least 100 million people in the US who are unhappy about the obvious fraud engaged in, in the recent elections. And, the Establishment fears a popular backlash. And, one way to slow that backlash is to stifle popular dissent. Ramp up the COVID scare. Increase lockdowns to separate the populous. Hold back economic recovery to starve the peasants and make them more dependent upon the Establishment through government largess. Get the populous more accustomed to invasive government practices. And, control of the media and communications is paramount to making that all work.
People have seen this coming for decades and no one wanted to listen. It became glaringly obvious during the Trump administration. And, most people ignored it because of a burgeoning economy and the Magic Kingdom syndrome. Now, the Magic Kingdom is closed and we have to return to reality. We’ll just have to see where we go from here.
These are some of the prohibited things at WordPress.com that they seem to be using as a reason to deplatform CTH.
. Hate speech or incitements to violence.
. Harassment or the encouragement of the harassment of others.
. Misrepresentative content. This includes but is not limited to:
Proliferating or creating verifiably false claims or content that could undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
. Deceiving users through artificial or manipulated media (images, audio, video) with the intent to influence political or social issues.
It’s all BS. These malignant soyboys and women really think they can do whatever they want. I really think the sh*t is gonna hit the fan soon if this continues.
We have been using GoDaddy Hosting and Domain Name for 10 year. Find an international company with servers and offices overseas. wordpress software is great however I would highly recommend security software besides Wordfence. There is nothing like having your site be redirected to a porn site. If you have any videos transfer them from YouTube and put them on something like Brighteon
or run clipbucket or your own servers and create your own youtube type of video server to power your media.
I’ve been giving thought to the problem of locating a server somewhere in the world that is more immune to leftist social pressure than the USA. Switzerland was the classic example, but they’ve largely bent over and spread ’em for the USA over the past 20 years and are now no more than useless beta bankers. So where would someone look?
For God’s sake, aren’t there any NON-rabid Leftists who provide platforms and email services? And if not, wth not? How many have seen this coming for a long time and done nothing to counteract it? I know less than nothing about this whole thing, so I’m pretty useless to help, but surely there are tech savvy people on the Right and ways of funding it. I just joined Parler and MeWe, although I’m not big on social media. I’m pushing them on my hubby’s Facebook page and haven’t gotten gigged yet. I’m telling everyone, the Right needs to make a mass exodus from all of these Leftist-controlled sites, taking our information and any income they make from us with us. F’em.
If you go to https://shadowban.eu and plug in someone’s (or your own) Twitter username, you can see what, if any, kind of shenanigans they’re pulling against that account.
They’re already monkeying around with Wood and Powell.
https://shadowban.eu/SidneyPowell1
https://shadowban.eu/LLinWood
I left Facebook for MeWe. No interest in Parler. It makes sense if you’re a blogger but if you need privacy then you simply cannot have your posts open to the world.
Gab was deplatformed. I liked it but……yeah, I went with MeWe.
But what happens when the credit card companies start deplatforming? Send checks? What happens when banks decline to process checks?
Where does this end?
So I’m in favor of building our own platforms…..but see this ending with civil war. Seriously. If we cannot tolerate each other this is a bad sign.
According to newsmax, the Wayne county board of elections is refusing to certify the results
Professor jacobson: It would be uplifting to see a post on this, so far Google can’t find it and I doubt they will
I continue to get annoyed that free market economy as well as freedom of speech can be shut down by a few individuals living and working in large companies in Ca and Wa.
That all being said. How do I as a small data center owner attract those businesses that want to setup a server in my small boutique data center in Columbia Mo? I won’t care about anybody’s content. I just need to fill my DC and make a living.
Do I join up and post to all forums and sights like this? Do I set marketing SEO keywords and worry that our GOOGLE friends will drop them because it moves away from their Narrative?
Anyway any suggestions or pointers in this space would be helpful.
Thanks
Kris
Thank you for your contemplated service.
You would have to ensure your bulk data feed comes from a source unlikely to cut you off for social justice pretenses.
I would compile a short list of right-leaning political causes, then post press releases to some of the major blogs covering those issues: LI, Ammoland, Tea Party, Right to Work, FIRE, state Right to Life orgs, etc. Maybe find a way to take out some ads on them. Once a few blogs migrate your way, word of mouth will be an effective force multiplier.
Then I would hire a massive tech squad to immediately begin armor-plating your site against all the harassment, hacking, and outright destruction your servers will immediately attract from social justice berzerkers, cretins, and locusts.
After that, it’s just rake in the dough. :-/
There is a precedent here: when Operation Chokepoint caused banks to cancel the credit-card processing ability of hundreds of firearms dealers, Phoenix dealer Kelly McMillan stepped up and created McMillan Merchant Solutions to offer a merchant services operation where dealers could sign up without fear of cancellation. I understand his company was quite successful in serving this niche, to the point where he now has a number of competitors.
So the strategy can work where there is a need… and it’s obvious the need is ramping.
Many years ago a friend pointed out cookies on the computer to me. I looked them up and even though the description said they weren’t invasive it made me paranoid.
I always wipe out my cookies and use CC Cleaner every time I turn the computer on.
Got rid of facebook somewhere around 2005 or 2006. Didn’t like it then and sure don’t like them now. Never had twitter and most of my fun time is going onto the hill dot com and riling the liberals up. Surprised they haven’t banned me although I have had time outs.