UPDATE 12/6/18: We never received a response from WordPress.com/Automattic in regard to our questions about how and why they censored Gallus Mag’s statement. Accordingly, we have ported our site to a different host, and restored the statement from Gallus Mag of GenderTrender to exactly how it was originally submitted to us.
Today Gallus Mag informed us that her statement, published in our previous post, has been retroactively edited. Specifically, someone at WordPress/Automattic redacted the name of the Canadian individual who–as Gallus Mag described in her statement–has brought a Human Rights Tribunal action against sixteen working class estheticians who did not want to wax the individual’s scrotum and testicles. This individual’s name was replaced by “[redacted]” in the four places it appeared in the original GenderTrender statement. This was a surprise to us, since we have done no editing to the statement, which we published, unchanged, exactly as sent to us by Gallus Mag.
Interestingly, the “deadnames” of Caitlyn Jenner (Bruce Jenner) and Donna Perry (Douglas Perry) were NOT redacted. This would seem to indicate that the new policy put in place by WordPress/Automattic only applies to the Canadian trans activist Gallus Mag named in her statement. This is very interesting, given that the individual’s human rights tribunal case is in Canada, and both 4thWaveNow and the (currently suspended) GenderTrender sites are located in the United States.
Below is how the post containing the GenderTrender statement now appears.
We are now considering our options, which include moving our site to a new platform. We intend to reproduce Gallus Mag’s statement again, in full, as soon as possible. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: 4thWaveNow reached out to WordPress support, asking for an explanation. In an email response from an employee named Clark with the title “Community Guardian,” he stated an email had been sent to us several days ago; we did locate the email in our spam folder after hearing from Clark. The most pertinent information [emphasis added by us here, in bold]:
We received a report regarding the publication of private/personal information on your blog. Specifically:
//4thwavenow.com/2018/11/17/wordpress-dumps-gendertrender-gallus-mag-responds/
(The malicious publication of private details related to gender identity, including former names.)
Publishing this type of content is forbidden by our Terms of Service, and we’ve hidden this content from public view.
Please desist from publishing content that violates our private information policy.
Of most interest (in bold above) is the assertion that the content was “hidden from public view.” Presumably, the method used to “hide” consisted of a WordPress employee entering our site, editing out the offending name, and manually replacing it with “[redacted]”.
We have written back to WordPress support, asking for further clarification:
Can you please explain how there was a “privacy violation”? The name you redacted was used PUBLICLY by the individual in question, across social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, It is not a “former” name. It is the individual’s legal name.Also, this is the first I’ve heard that WordPress can go into a post and actually make manual edits to text. Is that what occurred here?Thanks for your attention.
I hope you all are looking for another hosting site! Please let us know if you need crowdfunding support!
I too would be happy to contribute funds to help GenderTrender & other GC feminist blogs get set up on another platform. Thanks to both GallusMag & 4thWaveNow for all the important work you have done & I hope will continue to do.
Unbelievably unprofessional. This platform has gone completely rogue. This should be of interest to a much wider audience of users simply because of the precedent this sets.
Indeed. It is FAR FAR BETTER for a site to just ban content or remove posts/comments entirely, than for them to edit.
If a site edits your content, your followers think that the content came from you when it didn’t.
FWIW I’m looking into automating the process of setting up some independently hosted wordpress blogs, the idea being they could move easily to any raw data hosting platform (aws, etc). Full backups are of course always available then, since you own both the database and data volume and can back them up with regular tools.
Because yeah. People need to get OFF Automattic.
I’d suggest for this site and any others, go ahead and make your export archive NOW. If a site is still live, does this export process actually bring down local copies of the data?
My experience is that without plugins ($$$) you cannot export the whole thing intact to a desktop but presumably could export the text and media files separately. However if you have a web host it is very easy to copy the whole thing to your account there. I assume they use a script for that or have an arrangement with WordPress.com.
I am also happy to help fund a lawsuit or other activity that would push back. Is there a way that they are violating your copyright by unauthorized use of your text? Do you own the copyright or do they actually own all the material on WordPress?
WordPress.com copyright policy:
‘By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing, and promoting your blog. This license allows Automattic to make publicly-posted content available to third parties selected by Automattic (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) your content through their services. You also give other WordPress.com users permission to share your Content on other WordPress.com websites and add their own Content to it (aka to reblog your Content), so long as they use only a portion of your post and they give you credit as the original author by linking back to your website (the reblogging function on WordPress.com does this automatically!). If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from WordPress.com, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.’
The Electronic Frontier Foundation might be interested in censorship by such a major platform. https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
Let me know if I can help.
Heck yes, at the very least people should spread the word far and wide that Automattic is not above editing posts. This goes a step beyond merely banning.
Anyone who cares about the integrity of their content should learn from this that Automattic is not a site worth trusting.
Totally right!! Forgot all about the Electronic Frontier Foundation! ! The EFF would be excellent First Amendment plaintiffs against the banning of GenderTrender, the censoring of 4th Wave and the Twitter deadnaming tyranny.
Saw this yesterday and thought you were trying to stay out of trouble. Glad to hear you weren’t;)
How does one creepy, underemployed, Canadian dude with little money and no fame get everyone to do his bidding?
That’s what I want to know. These people keep claiming “oppression” and yet they’re far more powerful than just about anyone else!
That’s more or less what I asked in a comment on the previous post–how does this creep have so much influence that major platforms are willing to change their rules in order to take down those who expose him? There’s even some evidence that WordPress pulled the blogs of Gallus Mag and other feminists first and retconned their terms of service to justify the ban afterwards.
Now I’m wondering if maybe he’s threatened some sort of legal action to get his way in this case, just as in those faux human rights complaints against the women who wouldn’t wax his genitalia. If he can keep suppressing reports of these attempts to bully, extort, or groom, it’s easier for him to continue than it would be if people had enough information to recognize a pattern of behavior.
He is a vexatious litigant, i.e. are nutbar. Somebody who keeps suing and suing and suing like a stalker. But lots of different people. So maybe he is threatening them with law stuff. How he would really have a case I don’t know. So it could also be he’s making a threat that is just pathetic, and Automatic is being played by him and thinks they’re actually in some legal danger. If that’s so I want to know, among other reasons so I can have utter contempt for them.
I tend not to think that these large platforms are conceding to JY because he’s a prolific litigant. They have massive legal staffs and deal with frivolous litigation all day, every day. Threatening to sue them would have, I think, virtually no impact.
There’s something going here that we don’t have a handle on, yet.
This guy may harass individuals but has no legal power over the internet corporations, both in terms of resources and cause (Terms of Service clearly state that Automattic cannot be held liable for published content including privacy violations, so why would they care at all?). I would rather imagine a hacker threat, like a DDoS attack. Oh, and I don’t think he’s acting alone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/2018/11/28/big-techs-threat-to-freedom-of-expression/#4d58cb7f28c9
This excellent article discusses some of the issues in question and points out what I’d forgotten–that in the U.S., a law was passed in 1996 providing ‘immunity from liability for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” which publishes information by third-party users.’ This year Congress granted websites immunity for content provided by third-party users, with the exclusion of content related to sex trafficking–an exclusion which the big tech companies fought back against, claiming it would force them to block controversial political speech. Unbelievable.
So Twitter and WordPress Automatic are in no danger of being held legally liable for users posting Yaniv’s name or the screenshots of his pervy conversations about young girls, which means there’s something other than fear of litigation going on here. Maybe Yaniv and his pals are threatening a DDoS attack, but at this point I suspect there’s nothing deeper behind the suppression of feminist voices than straight-up misogyny and male camaraderie. We shouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating how much men despise us.
Maybe Janiv has the goods on other creepy dudes —> has copies of chats where all the creepy dudes gush out their pedophile fantasies and now he can expose them?
The plot thickens.
There’s a whole page dedicated to ‘redacted’ individual on https://kiwifarms.net/threads/jonathan-jessica-yaniv-trustednerd-trustednerd-com-jy-knows-it-jy-british-columbia.49790/
Happy to contribute to a lawsuit or hosting fees for a new platform. I’ve heard Iceland has strong anti censorship laws. Keep up the good work!
For what it’s worth, imgur (the image hosting platform) has removed (thankfully not EDITED) content of mine without telling me, before.
This past summer a coffeehouse in my town scheduled a showing of Nina Paley’s film “Seder Masochism.” I was quite looking forward to seeing it, and it made sense that the venue would show the film, because this is also Paley’s hometown. Local artist show, right?
But alas. Local trans activists alerted the coffeehouse that Paley is a “transphobe” (because she is out about having gender-critical views) and a shitstorm erupted on the event page, on the coffeehouse’s facebook. The place should be boycotted, people will be unsafe, all of this (despite the fact that the movie has nothing to do with trans issues). The head of the gender studies department at the University of Illinois even weighed in to have this show cancelled.
And so, the venue caved. But I took screenshots of the entire fight (which was happening on a public facebook event page). Paley then asked me if I could make them available to her — so I did, by uploading them to an album on imgur (for her to easily download). Paley then linked to the album from her own social media.
Overnight, my album was cleared out. The album was there, but was empty. I did not get any warning, any handslapping about violating the TOS, nothing.
So I made a new album, and uploaded the images again. But this time, I archived the images on the internet wayback machine, and confirmed that copies were on wayback’s servers (so on the public internet, out of imgur’s control).
Next morning the album was empty again — both albums, empty.
So I got mad, and made a single new image, which just said “the images in this album are available at [wayback URL].” I uploaded that single image to both albums. So they only had the one image in there.
Next day? THAT TOO WAS REMOVED. I kid you not. Again, no warning, no mail, no handslap, nothing, just gone. At that point it’s clearly some sort of thoughtcrime, because whatever it is in those images isn’t even on their site anymore — the new image was just a TEXT URL in a red bold font!
So I reuploaded that redirect image, again.
At that point it seems imgur gave up, because the image is still there, and it’s got something like 400 views.
This is madness.
OMG. That’s worth an article right there.
Hell yes!
Holy monkeys! And imgur is supposed to be y’know kinda rude.
Definitely do an article! Maybe for Conatus. I don’t know much about them it’s an online magazine. But they had, I’ve forgotten her name’s, article about the lesbian protest at London’s pride parade this past summer.
And they had this one yesterday. They will understand your experience. 😆
https://conatusnews.com/apology-conatus-news-editorial-team-twitter-moderation-staff/
I sure hope 4thWaveNow can move its content to a new website. I’d do the same except I don’t write new posts anymore. I’ll follow you wherever you go, 4thwave!
Thank you! Why aren’t you writing new posts? You’ve done such great work.
Thanks for the compliment! I’ve made some major life changes lately and there’s no opportunity for writing at the moment, plus I’m more interested in fiction now.
I would move it anyway. An astonishing amount of older gender critical material is on wordpress.com, and they can always just keep changing their policies and removing more content. That scares me.
If you’re not going to post or moderate comments anymore and don’t want to pay to maintain it, then maybe have an archived copy on someone else’s site. Or copy the whole thing to your desktop as a backup. There are one-click programs that will install wordpress software for you on your desktop, though duplicating the site will take more effort without plugins on your wordpress account (which cost money).
I might be wrong but I think your site’s been shadowbanned on the WordPress Reader, too. I realized I didn’t have you listed and looked you up using both ‘fourth’ and ‘4th.’ Your blog doesn’t show up.
I still really wonder if the BC Human Rights Commission is behind this. As soon as Gallus Mag published information that would HORRIFY the Canadian public about its work, she suddenly got shut down and then it is exactly what was edited out of her statement in response. It doesn’t matter how uninformed anybody is about trans ideology, a grown man offering his “help” in putting tampons in 10 year old girls will make their ears steam right off the sides of their heads. That was the guy the taxpayer supported BCHRC was fronting for. The BCHRC has the power of the state, which still outweighs that of even the richest Silicon Valley fantasist or trust fund trans ideologue.
That makes a lot more sense, but why would these platforms give a damn about the BCHRC? They’re not Canadian. It’s just insane. I think they had a beef with rad-fems already and are using this as an excuse. Helluva hill to die on, but whatever.
I agree. They are so clearly enforcing these daft rules specifically against radical feminists and the more professional and popular blogs like Gender Trender. Everyone is going to break Twitter’s deadnaming rule, by accident, but few will be prosecuted.
Which makes this even more of a good story for equal access to the Internet organizations. It’s so arbitrary. It’s so them riding roughshod over us because they’re not making rules and telling us what the rules are so allowing us to decide whether to go to their site. They’re making up rules after the fact. That’s so not law!
Fun thing, 2 days ago I believe a Facebook executive in London got a knock on the door from the British Parliament’s SERGEANT AT ARMS! And demanded the Facebook guy turn over some documents. This is part of the Brexit Cambridge Analytica inquiry in the UK. But I like the idea of these social media companies, that seem to be run by really right wing people, getting Sergeanted at Arms. Oh, and he turned over the documents. 🙂
Good gravy! What is Automatic doing? I guess they’re betting no one is going to take them to court and in that setting demonstrate that they are behaving like a buncha nutbags. Because if there’s some law that they’re breaching, for instance by taking away Gallus’s content, or right that they’re failing to respect then demonstrating they’re *explicitly targeting* Gallus and the other radical feminists for that breach of the law would be super easy. Mr. Waxy Balls may be a vexatious litigant, but I don’t think anyone advises dealing with that by becoming utterly sycophantic to them. Which clearly Automatic is doing. 🤦🏻♀️
Also if they have a legal basis for doing this, like they’re doing it in response to some legal filing from Mr. Waxy Balls why wouldn’t they just contact 4thwavenow and ask her to censor it? That’s what’s so weird about this. They’re running around in secret like they’re trying to Appease the Emperor.
It’s probably easier to make a case against a private platform for defamation than for censorship, and Automatic may also believe they have more to fear from a creepy psychopath than from radical feminists.
Clearly everyone with a wordpress site needs to move the hosting of it to a new hosting service.
And then we have to hope that these same people don’t successfully harass alternative hosts.
This is absolutely chilling! It reminds me of all those photos Stalin doctored to edit out people he’d purged or declared enemies of the people. Editing a blog behind the blogger’s back is straight out of totalitarianism!
So is forbidding so-called dead-naming. I was married to a TIM. Am I now to be forbidden from referring to those 30-plus years or the 58 years he lived as a man?
No….if only due to the fact that the records, especially after 30 years shows….tada….A TRACK RECORD. That is something that cannot be erased.
No matter what is said by others, this cannot be erased. Any agency, any employer…..if there is a question about the authenticity of a CV or the statements on a loan application, then the records are there. Even on the change of name at the DMV [what I found out several years ago is, even though there can be a name change, there is a secondary, back-up ‘hidden’ record kept with info under the old name. This is used to verify that….in theory….the DL or ID is not being issued under fraudulent circumstances].
You are not forbidden from the dead-naming. Look at it this way: if the brigade is allowed to use derogatory terms for women or other minority groups [which can be and IS just as bad as ‘dead-naming’], then what you are doing, in the name of protecting your own interests, is not wrong in the least.
This kind of stuff surrounding names happens to people in different circumstances for more minor issues. For instance, my elderly mother went to the DMV to renew her driver’s license. She took all the required documentation, per the DMV, so she could get the security enhanced version. She gave them her birth certificate, which has her maiden name and they said since the surnames don’t match, they’d need documentation to show the changes from her maiden name to her current name.
Now, my mother has been married twice. She did not revert back to her maiden name between marriages, so she would need her birth certificate, two marriage licenses, and a divorce decree. As she told me, “The marriage license and divorce decree were SIXTY YEARS AGO. I think I’ll take the regular license and just get a passport.”
Keeping my original birth name after getting married has never looked like such a good choice at this point. And, welcome to proving who, exactly, you are transidentified people. It’s not like other people who change their names are given a clean slate and never have to cope with showing their past history.
Yeah. I strongly advise keeping your unmarried name. Had I known what a PITA it would be I would never have changed mine. Even with the hyphen it’s still annoying. I had to order my marriage license from another state when I renewed my license. Not even worth it.
They sanitized the entire page but forgot the link to older comments which still have the name. It looks like it was done manually.
The guy has a locked up Twitter account with 146K followers. What the hell is it about, some kind of a pedo ring, with money and influence???
And most of those ‘followers’ never interact with him meaning he bought them.
This is astonishing. I am in touch with a First Amendment expert and former lobbyist who is encouraging me to request a meeting on the Hill, and call for a Congressional inquiry, along the lines of what Gallus originally asked for. I’m going to reach out to you via text.
Did you hear about this?
“Mom Says 6-Year-Old Son Is Transgender. Dad Disagrees. Now He Might Lose His Son.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38728/mom-says-6-year-old-son-transgender-dad-disagrees-amanda-prestigiacomo
Oh, and the 6-year-old child has not “come out” as transgender, either. It’s all in his mom’s opinion. She is “affirming” him against his will!
I wonder if money from the usual suspects is behind this censorship somehow. Usual suspects discussed in this link: http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
While Mr Wax-My-Hairy-Balls was clearly the impetus to get rid of GenderTrender, I suspect that the reason it happened at this particular time is more to do with the fact that trans issues are finally starting to get a lot more scrutiny from your average person in the mainstream, and a lot of average people are pretty appalled at what they’re finding.
In an increasing number of countries, we’re really starting to see the rubber hit the road as all of these pro-trans policies and pro-trans cultural shifts that have been happening quietly behind the general public’s back are suddenly starting to erupt into real life, and people are being confronted with bizarre situations like the fact that their 16 yo daughter has to change with an intact male at school, or their autistic child is transed, or they’re told that female biology can’t be talked about because it’s hateful, and they ask WTF is going on?
And then you have a blog like GenderTrender, that was 8 years of meticulous documentation showing exactly how we got here, pointing out many of the different parties responsible, and stating clearly what the trans agenda is really up to (i.e. eroding women’s sex-based rights).
I think the reasons for the twitter bans are probably similar. And all backed up by deep hatred of women, and feminists in particular, and radical feminists most of all.
Ironically, though, these gagging attempts show that people were finally starting to listen to what radical feminists have been saying for years and years. And I think not just about the trans stuff, but also about other issues like pornography, as we’re seeing the damaging effects of that more and more clearly as well.
And because, at this point, pretty much all other forms of feminism have been corrupted into male-pleasing bullshit, it’s the radical feminists who are the ones making sense to the average person, and consequently being given a wider hearing than we usually enjoy. And thus it becomes urgent to shut us up by any means necessary.
This is why we can’t let it stay gone. It’s a repository. GM does meticulous research and it’s all available. I suspect plenty of reporters use it for reference. We’ve got to get the money and technical knowledge to get her set up somewhere she safe.
Need to get it back from WordPress first, what with them having stolen it.
@Miep- See below
Apparently she did get it back. She now needs technical and financial help to house it elsewhere and go on. Check out gendercritical reddit for a post where she details what she needs.
IA with your point about trans issues finally getting more scrutiny – in the UK, in particular, there have been more trans questioning articles in major news outlets, good recent discussions on BBC Woman’s Hour, and even the recent Trans kids documentary.
As you say, her work is an amazing resource, going back years. And so many people, once confronted, found her blog and spent hours reading through it. Again, check out gender critical reddit, look for the post on today’s front page, and see whether you can help.
Thanks for that, Lilith.
Not sure my comments show up on this platform anymore.
NONE of your comments show up in our notifications. We have to open the Admin panel in WordPress and search by comment author name to find yours. Clearly Automattic is somehow shadow-banning you while still allowing you to comment.
Can anyone confirm that feministcurrent is not reachable?
https://www.feministcurrent.com/
Seems to be back up.
I can’t get it – error 522, connection timed out.
I could get in right now. Maybe they’re just having technical problems.
As a matter of fact, I just looked at it for the first time yesterday and it was working just fine. (And Twitter can’t ban me for that because I don’t have an account)
It’s flickering. Now it loads but I was getting an error for a while:
Error 521 Ray ID: ….
Web server is down
Same result in 2 browsers, with or without a proxy.
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200171916-Error-521
“Error 521 occurs because the origin web server refuses a connection from Cloudflare. More specifically, Cloudflare tried to connect to your origin server on port 80 or 443 but received a connection refused error.”
“Common causes
The two most common causes leading to Error 521 are:
The web server is offline
…
Cloudflare requests are blocked
The origin web server or hosting provider’s network might be blocking Cloudflare’s requests. As a reverse proxy, Cloudflare connects to your server from a Cloudflare IP and all subsequent traffic comes exclusively from a smaller set of Cloudflare IPs. As a result, certain server-side security solutions might mistake the increase in legitimate connections from this smaller set of IPs as an attack. This results in some Cloudflare IPs being blocked or rate-limited”
Misconfiguration? A hosting problem? A large DDoS attack (cannot be handled by CloudFlare) or an attack *behind* CloudFlare? I saw the error AFTER other commenters said it was on. Something is funny about this inconsistency to be just misconfiguration.
Maybe the motive is similar to Gallus Mag’s comments being shadow banned here. If you shut down a site or person completely, the action is unambiguous and might be challenged or publicized, but if you make it look like a technical glitch, you could silence women in a passive aggressive way. Women who complain about this can then be portrayed as paranoid or technologically incompetent. This kind of behavior is not uncommon in totalitarian regimes.
WoLF referred to the banning of GenderTrender extensively in their initial announcement of their legal challenge against WordPress/Automattic and seemed to imply they were representing my interests.
——————-
“We learned later that day that GenderTrender, and several other feminist blogs, had suffered the same fate, based on the selective prosecution of a recent change to WordPress’s terms of service. As noted in GallusMag’s post regarding the suspension of GenderTrender:
“There are over 36,000 blogs on Automattic/Wordpress.com that refer to the individual many know as Bruce Jenner. According to the new, unannounced TOS, these blogs are committing an act of malicious publication of Jenner’s private information and are subject to immediate removal from the platform without warning.
To be clear: As of November 13, 2018, the former life of any individual who now declares themselves transgender can never be referred to using materials which reveal the name they formerly used, even if it is their legal name, the name they used last week, or the name by which they are commonly known. For example, quoting news sources which identified serial killer “Donna Perry” by his former name Douglas Perry has become an act of “malicious publication” according to Automattic/Wordpress.com which will result in sudden removal of the blog (and any other unrelated blogs by the same author) from the platform, without prior notification or opportunity for appeal, even if that post was made prior to the unannounced changes to the TOS.”
By the next day, it had become clear to all of us that, in spite of offering to allow us to download our content, WordPress had no intention of allowing us any access to our media files. The interfaces they directed us to work only if the blog is still live, and don’t allow the transfer of media files from suspended sites. Perhaps this is an oversight, but it isn’t our oversight, and it shouldn’t prevent WordPress from keeping their word to us.
Years worth of screenshots, PDFs, and related data files, are now threatened with imminent deletion. All of this information, to our knowledge, was originally part of the public domain, even if it’s no longer available online anywhere besides the reporting archives of feminist blogs.
No evidence has been provided that so much as a single post on any of these feminist sites contained any incitement to violence or other criminal activity, or in any way constituted speech not protected under First Amendment rights. Neither had WordPress formerly represented itself as a platform with a political agenda, nor one where the opinions of its employees would be imposed arbitrarily and without notice on longstanding customers.
📷
Formal notice sent to WordPress regarding access to media files
Thanks to the generosity of Cathy Brennan, we were able to secure legal services to formally request that WordPress follow through on their claim that we would be allowed to download our content.
We hope that WordPress will do the right thing, for all parties affected, and make good on their representations to their customers that they will allow the export of our content if they no longer wish to host our sites.
Sincerely,
The WoLF Board”
http://womensliberationfront.org/wordpresss-suspension-of-gender-identity-watch/
———————
That implication is not true. GenderTrender has no relationship with WoLF and they have never represented GT in any capacity.
WoLF went on to conduct a fundraiser proposing to represent the interests of lesbians/feminists who had been censored or banned on blogging platforms and social media. Women who were aggrieved by the banning of GenderTrender, Meghan Murphy, and the editing of, and threat to 4thWaveNow, among others, contributed to this fund on the expectation that they were helping to support the interests of these women.
Automattic/Wordpress released the hijacked image files to the banned blogs on Monday November 26. WoLF continued to actively fundraise. On December 1, Ruth Barrett sent out a mass email requesting donations to this campaign.
WoLF raised over THIRTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS (!!!) for the purpose of supporting lesbians/feminists who had been or were facing bans on blogging platforms and social media, and now have added a statement to the bottom of their appeal announcing that they had cancelled their legal challenge and were treating the funds as a general donation to their organization:
“Update: WordPress has relented and sent us the full complement of media files for Gender Identity Watch, so we’ll be able to fully restore the site without needing to take further legal action. Thank you to everyone for your help and willingness to support women’s speech!
We’ll continue to use all donations to resist the erasure of the rights of women and girls, and we’ll have further updates for our supporters on our next steps soon.”
https://womensliberationfront.nationbuilder.com/wordpress-ban
————————————–
No longer will these funds be used to “Fight The Bans On Women’s Speech”, now they will be used at WoLF’s discretion more generally to “continue to resist the erasure of the rights of women and girls”. Whatever that means.
This is unacceptable. Women contributed to the fundraiser for a specific purpose: reversing the ban on women’s speech as evidenced by the examples cited in WoLF’s campaign- GenderTrender, etc.
From my perspective, as Gallus Mag of GenderTrender, this was a disgraceful and cynical act of exploitation conducted by WoLF, exploiting the concerns of my readers, many of whom are low income.
I would like to see WoLF transfer these funds to an independent board (not controlled by WoLF) created to administer a specialized dedicated server with professional security purchased from a respected internet provider. Such an arrangement would provide hosting to a large number of lesbian/feminist websites (including WoLF’s, if they’d like) without forcing content creators to engage in perpetual fundraising to keep their sites online. Thirteen thousand dollars would fund such an arrangement for OVER TEN YEARS.
– GM
This comment was in our spam folder, unlike earlier Gallus Mag comments which simply didn’t show up in notifications (but we could hunt them down). So someone at Automattic had to deliberately spam just this ONE comment
Are you sure it wasn’t because of links? Does your link count setting send comments into spam sometimes?
Good question, but at this point, we wouldn’t be surprised at anything the Automattic censors might do. Why would Gallus’ comments not appear in our notifications like everyone else’s, especially when we approve every one (once we are alerted by Gallus that she submitted them)?
Yes, that’s weird.
Are you talking about your email provider spam folder or your WordPress admin panel? Email spam is managed by your email provider, not by senders, otherwise, spam protection would be useless.
The email from WordPress support ended up in Spam too, and I’ve seen some commenters in this blog complaining that their comments didn’t come through and reposting. Your email provider might think some messages from wordpress.com are spam (which is, probably, true). On the WordPress side comments are managed by an engine (Akismet) and it’s configured by a user. Sending email notifications is automated, done by software. The earlier notification problem might’ve been a bug which is now fixed. An employee can edit a comment manually, but there is no revolt of the machines, not yet.
I’ve seen non-technical people who’s got harassed or shadow banned and start seeing *any* computer malfunctioning as a conspiracy against them. Please, don’t lose your mind.
No, we are NOT talking about email. This has nothing to do with email, and we are perfectly aware that our email account is not controlled by WordPress (we actually aren’t completely ignorant Luddites with no knowledge of computer software). We are talking about tlhe Notifications part of the WordPress application/UI. The issue of zero notifications appearing for Gallus Mag (while appearing for every other commenter) has not changed; this is likely not a bug, because even after we approve her comments they do not appear in the notifications list. As we said earlier, we can find her comments in the WPAdmin part of the WordPress application by searching on her name. Don’t worry–we aren’t losing our minds, nor are we tinfoil hat wearers.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Y’all must have some type of safe place for your blogs and I can’t think of a better use for money raised in your name.
I knew the donation I made was for gender identity watch but I hoped one blog owner lawyering up would benefit all, and my impression is that it did.
I do wish they had let us know as soon as they got the files instead of waiting until they were sure they could restore the blog, and in the meantime soliciting more money (including Lierre here), but I don’t mind if they use it for other legal action since I support their legal action in general. In the future I hope WoLF will be more transparent.
I don’t think everyone one one site is a good idea- I think it would make too tempting a target. I think the solution is to be constantly backed up offline (easy with a web host) and prepared to move on short notice. If people can’t afford basic web hosting they may have bigger problems than AFTAs (speaking as someone on disability and accustomed to poverty here). Feel free to disagree.
I sent money once to WoLF a few years ago and something that put me off from actually signing up with them was that you had to agree to their “social media policy”. I want to be the one to determine whether my social media usage is irresponsible 🙂 and it seemed excessively controlling for them to want potential members to agree to such a policy. This news is not making me feel more confident in that organization.
Glad your archives were released!
I have no problem with them requesting adherence to a socially responsible social media policy. We can use more of that. It gets us further, since no one cares what threats THEY make to us, if we even come about ill tempered it’s reported and we lose our blog. Face it, they have a legion of unemployable, mentally ill thugs who follow us across platforms and report anything remotely acceptable to Twitter/FB et al low standards for banning us. If we are banned, or blocked, or our comments ‘shadow banned’ women who need us cannot read us.
Oh, after I said it loads, Error 521 again.
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This is all so weird. Hope every site can be saved.
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meanwhile, as we desperately try to recoup our own property !! built with our tiny women’s and lesbian incomes from low paid minimum wage jobs to feed ourselves, our children, our elders, and help each other too, this is happening, spearheaded by a man who is handsomely PAID by publicly funded university and government, our taxes, to block our efforts to sustain generations of our hard fought for women’s sex based rights, and more currently, to protect our children, and the children of our communities:
https://twitter.com/kristopherwells?lang=en
Do you know for sure he is behind it?
I am a prof at the U of Alberta and have noticed how frequently he has been featured in the local newspaper. I tried to send in an oped and letter to the newspaper making rad fem points about trans issues in response to his pieces and these were never even acknowledged. I have published opeds on other topics there so it was surprising to not even get a refusal. I wondered then about his influence. If you can document how he is behind this campaign I’d be glad to be in touch about organizing a response.
read through that Twitter, and tell me he is not an organizer and that it’s not part or the whole of his professorship. And I think, there are others like him, in other uni ‘gender studies’. I can’t fathom how this is a university discipline.
Dear Jane,
I’m not trying to fight you? I’m not going to read his entire Twitter history. But have you seen a specific place where he says “I organized the take down of Gallus Mag”? I am guessing he’d cheerlead for it, for sure, but I just mean — did he really say he is the person behind it?
regards
Kathleen
Gallus Mag was not mentioned in my comment? Where did you get I said anything about her, vis a vis him and his work? I am speaking generally of the situation for these gender warriors who are university/college professors and who use that position for activism. A professor’s salary, an office filled with admin staff, being the voice to the media, pushing conferences and workshops on one issue, paid for with government funding, probably bringing along single issue grad students.
Why don’t you, or Lise, apply for similar funding and positions and have one issue Twitters, where you mention your status at a university…?
Exactly.
sorry for misunderstanding you.
By “this is happening” I was referring to the activism documented in thisTwitter, using this twitter as an example of university sanctioned and paid for shutting down of women’s rights.
“This”..(link).
This is an example of paid activism sanctioned by a university and paid for by our taxes, we who live in poverty and pay for all our meetings and actions. What we do is not sanctioned and by doing it we risk our lives and that of our children.
They build their careers.
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