Monday, May 24, 2021

Help, Help, I'm Being Repressed!

When I turned on the computer this morning, and went to check the status of the blog, I was greeted with this warning from Google: 

This post was unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines.

Several possibilities crowded my mind. Did I allow a little too much areola to show on one of those girls in the most recent Palm Sunday post, express inadvertent racism or misgender someone? It wasn't immediately obvious, but I managed to at least figure out which post was responsible, and was surprised that it was little one off about new thoughts on the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus. It had two major parts, first a link to and teaser quote from a quite serious article by Nicholas Wade, who said, that looking at all available evidence, the evidence suggesting the virus was modified and escaped from a virus lab, presumably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is well known for working with and modifying coronaviruses is stronger than the evidence that it jumped directly from wildlife to humans. It even said, and I reiterated the point, that it is not a matter of certainty, only a matter of which origin story seemed more likely given available evidence. In the past few days we've seen rising interest in the lab origin theory around the country, and even the sainted Dr. Fauci admits the possibility. Does scientific thinking now violate Google community standards? I hope not.

The second part of the post was a link to a Tweet which had a graph which purported to show that the strength of the lock down in states was not particularly well correlated with the outcomes as measured by deaths per 100k, but that the "freedom index" was rather well correlated with unemployment per 100k, with "freer" states having lower 44% lower unemployment. Being social science, this is a lot sketchier, depending on how one defines "freedom," but again, nothing exceptional. One imagines the people constructing the "freedom index" had an axe to grind, but then, who doesn't; certainly not Google.

So I went off to the Blogger Community Guidelines to see where these might have fallen afoul, and this was the closest thing I could find:

Misleading content related to harmful health practices: misleading health or medical content that promotes or encourages others to engage in practices that may lead to serious physical or emotional harm to individuals, or serious public health harm.

My bold. I don't see where my post promoted or encourage any others to engage in any practices, let alone "practices that may lead to serious physical or emotional harm to individuals, or serious public health harm".

My guess is that somebody flagged to post to Google and complained that it , and they unpublished it rather than actually read and understand the post itself.

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