WordPress has deplatformed the Conservative Treehouse (CTH), the blog announced on Friday.
The website, that has existed for ten years, has been denied hosting by WordPress.com, a hugely popular hosted blogging platform owned by Automattic – in yet another reminder of why reliance on corporate and centralized Silicon Valley services and platforms can be a mistake for any independent creator or publisher.
According to the site, WordPress informed the site’s owners that their content was “incompatible” with the company’s terms of use, giving them until December 2 to move the site to another hosting service.
Just like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others often take down content and issue bans against users without providing any concrete reason for the decision, CTH said it was hit with deplatforming by WordPress without receiving any proper explanation as to why the content on the site was incompatible with that of the hosting service in question – other than perhaps for its conservative politics?
Citing some of the reasons WordPress might have justifiably removed the site, such as hate speech, abuse, violent or graphic content of any kind, the blog post concluded that CTH contains none of these, instead focusing on providing a “library of factual citations and explanations.”
The post also describes the site as a place of discussion and assembly, that has more than 200,000 subscribers and between half a million and a million daily unique visitors, and therefore sees its deplatforming as a threat to the right to “truthful assembly.”
The timing of the decision made by WordPress – immediately after the US election and after an article exploring what’s referred to as the Covid agenda and Biden’s policies – is also viewed as suspect by CTH.
But CTH’s owners pledge that the site will remain online, along with their stated mission they will preserve the content accumulated over the years.
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