Wednesday, November 9, 2022

The VALrus and the Censorer

The time has come, the VALrus said, 
To talk of many things:
Elections, coincidence, censorship-y stuff, 
Control by pulling strings.
And if some words can trigger those
With power that they bring

I woke up on election day with an email from BLOGGER. We are not besties. We do not communicate on a regular basis. We communicate NEVER. Yet there it was. Informing me that a post on my super-secret blog, by my alter ego, had been UNPUBLISHED for violating community guidelines!

Can you believe that? VAL, a valedictorian, ever-mindful of her permanent record, had published something that was a violation?

BLOGGER said I had the option to edit the post, and submit it for review, to have it re-posted if the offensive material was removed.

Here's the suspicious part. At least in MY mind:

THAT POST WAS FROM JANUARY 20, 2014

Seriously. How in the Not-Heaven has that post survived for 8 years and 9 months, and just NOW been flagged as a violation??? Here's my theory: THE TITLE! Which was:

"Nominated, The Pony Will Run. If Elected, He Will Serve."

Is that irony? To have it rejected on election day? If not, I'm sure somebody will inform me in the comments of my ignorance of irony.

Anyhoo... that post was simply about The Pony, in his sophomore year of high school, being nominated to apply to attend Missouri Scholars Academy. That appeared to be the offending part. The link to Missouri Scholars Academy. Which had been fine for 8 years and 9 months, but just became a malware threat on election day.

HEH! HEH! I JUST NOW GOT AN EMAIL FROM BLOGGER RE-INSTATING THE POST!

Negating the whole purpose of THIS post. That BLOGGER is quite the jokester. I'm not laughing. Here's a link to that post, should you care to peruse it for yourself. It's not all that interesting. Some people might even be confused... I am NOT fishing for comments. I don't want them, actually, on an 8-year-9-month-old post!

Just sayin'. What are the odds of such a flagging? Yeah. I'm a well-known conspiracy theorist. But surely you don't think it was pure coincidence, with the title having nothing to do with it.

8 comments:

  1. As this years results come in all I can say is THANK GOD our Democracy is saved!! I could say mor on our leadership but don't wish to be censored in 8 years.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Heh, heh! BIG BLOGGER is indeed reading your comments, so that's a good move! You won't have that 8 years hanging over your head while you count down to your impending censorship.

      Delete
  2. You're lucky that post got reinstated. A friend here in Australia had his entire blog removed because of something similar in one post. He had to restart with a new blog. All his old posts are gone forever and they wouldn't even tell him what he had posted that was offensive, so he had no option to fix it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah. I posted daily on that blog, and other incarnations of it, since 2005. So that's around 6000 posts, and only one from 8 years ago was considered A PROBLEM! So I do count myself lucky.

      Delete
  3. I don't see a single offensive thing in that old post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's what I thought when I went back to read the "draft" of it. Since the email specifically mentioned malware, I assumed it could only be that link to Missouri Scholars Academy, and I removed the link.

      I still don't see how it was only noticed after 8 years, on election day, coincidentally having the word "elected" in the title. Almost as if a web crawler singled it out for review.

      Delete
  4. Somebody always has to have their schnoz in someone else's business, don't they? Offensive is in the eye of the beholder. Glad you got reinstated. your blog is my go to for mental stimulation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can't imagine how somebody could be offended by the Missouri Scholars Academy. What are they, some kind of anti-intellectual-ite? As for the link having malware, I think it would have already outlived its usefulness as far as infecting people's devices. Eight years is ample enough time, I would think.

      I'm a self-importance-inflator, drive a Gator, I'm a mental-stimulator... I get unpublished on the run.

      Delete