Vox Day, the publisher of Arkhaven Comics, had his personal blog Vox Popoli deplatformed by Google’s blogging platform Blogger. Day had anticipated the censorship and backed up the posts on another website.
Day was deplatformed on August 11. On visiting the blog, visitors got the message,“This blog is under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations and is open to authors only.”
It is not clear why Blogger deplatformed Day’s blog.
Day took to MiloBookClub.com to address the deplatforming. In a post with the title “Conflict is the air we breathe,” he said: “As you’ve almost certainly noticed if you’re here, Google has decided to roll the dice and take its chances with the Legal Legion of Evil. As with YouTube, Blogger hasn’t entirely deplatformed the account, but instead elected to block access to the blog while publicly issuing false and defamatory statements about it.”
Day then proceeds to note that they had anticipated the censorship and prepared for it.
“This is not a surprise. This day has been a long time in coming, and we have been prepared for it on every front. You may wish to note that this post was made barely an hour after Google take action. Special thanks to the dev team, who were ready for instant action and whose rapid response time allowed such an easy and seamless transformation,” he wrote.
On the website MiloBookClub.com, Day had backed up all his content posted from 2003 and the site urges readers to use the voxday.net domain going forward.
“All the historical blog content is here dating back to 2003, but the comments are gone and we are not going to turn the comments on here yet. If you wish to comment on a post, we’ll be putting up SocialGalactic threads for each post here and you can discuss the posts there,” he explained.
“Obviously, this doesn’t work for anyone who isn’t on SG, but then, all you have to do is subscribe to UATV and you’ll get a free SG subscription that will give you access there. The sidebars are presently outdated, but they’ve been backed up as well and will be updated soon,” he added.
The comic writer then took the opportunity to remind people about the importance of building their own platforms instead of relying on Big Tech platforms.
“This is, of course, yet another reminder – as if another one was necessary – of why acclimatizing to the The Cult of Free is a fundamental mistake and why building our own platforms is an absolute priority.”
