Monday, September 26, 2011

Activist Post Rises from the Ashes

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ActivistPost.com rejoined the living Sunday night, with a lame apology from someone claiming to be an engineer at Blogger who placed the blame for the assassination of the site on "an automated process." [Evidently Blogger/Google has something in place that takes down sites when they cross some threshold in the number of people they're waking up.]

Below is the statement Activist Post published regarding the site takedown [emphasis mine].

As many of you already know, this site was taken down by Blogger this past Friday. It came as a shock to us and our loyal readers. Given the controversial topics that we cover, it's perfectly understandable to speculate that Google removed us as a form of blunt censorship. Indeed, that's precisely what we thought happened.

We’re eternally grateful to those who made the story of our removal go viral. Regardless of the actual reason Google erased this site, the power of the alternative community was proven this weekend. The incredible support and buzz generated by this story seemed to influence Google to respond quickly, and Activist Post was fully restored Sunday evening.

Here is the exact quote from their engineer:
I'm an engineer on blogger. I'd like to apologise on behalf of the team for the removal of activistpost.com. The removal was caused by an automated process, and we restored the blog as soon as the issue was brought to our attention.
Activist Post was started modestly on Blogger in June 2010 by average people who could no longer stand by quietly while the world descended further into the clutches of tyranny. Because of the unyielding passion and conviction of truth, peace, and liberty activists, and the solidarity of the alternative news community, we quickly exploded beyond anything we could have imagined. Until now, Blogger has served us well.

For the past few months we have discussed moving to an independent platform to avoid this exact scenario. This situation, however debilitating, has created the opportunity for us to do just that. Additionally, we realized that our content has outgrown our template's ability to organize it properly. Over the next couple of weeks we will roll out our new platform. In the meantime, we'll continue our work as usual.

We are overwhelmed by the outpouring of support during this shutdown. Many amazing people from around the world in the alternative news community offered us servers and technical support. Our stellar contributors and loyal readers made their voices heard loud and clear that censorship will not be tolerated. We are humbled and more motivated than ever because of your heartfelt support.

Despite the tremendous challenges facing humanity, this situation proved to us that the human spirit, powered by truth and principle, is invincible. We know now, more than ever, that peace, love, and liberty will indeed prevail over the darkness that currently shadows our world. They cannot stop us when we work together, for we are many and they are few.

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