President Trump is finally doing something about the toxic practice of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and blogging platforms like WordPress censoring, suspending, banning and outright de-platforming conservatives and Christians.
This blog, Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM), has repeatedly been victimized by the social media tech giants in their continuing effort to silence us.
Our suffering began on August 15, 2018, when WordPress, in the early morning, pre-dawn darkness, arbitrarily and without forewarning took down FOTM, which I had founded nearly 9 years ago in December 2009. I was told that FOTM had violated WordPress’ terms of service, but was not told exactly which term(s) of service we allegedly had violated, nor what FOTM had done that constituted such violation. This is what makes WordPress’s takedown entirely arbitrary.
At the time when WordPress took down FOTM, this blog had more than 63 million views, which is a phenomenal achievement since FOTM is a non-commercial blog, owned and staffed by unpaid volunteers.
The abrupt taking down, without forewarning, of FOTM led to a frantic search for an alternate blog host-server, followed by the herculean task of moving FOTM to our new server — a task with which we were unfamiliar, resulting in countless previously-published posts that were now in “Draft” mode. Altogether, we had more than 75,000 “draft” files that required me to inspect and re-publish one-by-one because many of those “draft” files are duplicate posts. As of today, there still remain nearly 47,000 “draft” files. I have already resigned myself to the reality that many of our previously-published posts will never be re-published because I simply don’t have the time and energy to go through them all.
But that wasn’t the end of FOTM‘s troubles.
In the early morning darkness on November 6, 2018, Facebook took down FOTM‘s page with thousands of followers. Facebook also took down Dr. Eowyn’s personal FB page.
Even after we moved to another host-server and resuscitated FOTM on August 23, we repeatedly experienced spam and distributed denial-of-service bot attacks, which resulted in periods when FOTM was inaccessible.
In total, moving FOTM to another host-server and the periodic attacks incurred costs of more than $2,000, as well as ongoing costs of $15 a month for a managed Cloud server with capacious data storage that is necessitated by those tens of thousands “draft” files.
The most recent blow was, once again, struck by WordPress.
Although FOTM had been moved to another host-server, we continued to use WordPress as a blogging platform or template because our readers are accustomed to FOTM‘s format.
On April 16, 2019, WordPress abruptly and without forewarning canceled the Premium Jetpack software for which I had paid $99. That software is what enables features like readers’ comments, blog count (number of views) and other statistics. So vindictive is WordPress that not only did they cancel our Premium Jetpack, they also disabled FOTM from using their free version of Jetpack.
That led to another crisis that FOTM and our readers had to endure and overcome, which we eventually did by restoring some, but not all of the Jetpack functions, with individual “plug ins”.
Needless to say, since the systematic attacks on FOTM began last August, our number of views has declined precipitously. This blog once had an Alexa ranking of 200,000-something worldwide and 43,000 in the United States. No more….
President Donald Trump has heard our cries for help.
The Trump White House has created a way for us to relate to him how we’ve been mistreated — as individuals, websites, and blogs. This is the message on a new White House webpage, “Tech Bias Story“:
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies.
No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.
Below the message is a box with the word “Start”. Click “Start” to tell President Trump your account of how you’ve been mistreated.
Thank you and God bless you, President Trump!
H/t CSM
~Eowyn
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