After My Response to Her Hateful Post Rose to #1, Cowardly Race-Baiter The DiDi Delgado Blocked Me to Make My Response Disappear
Another Call to Medium/Medium Staff to Change Their “Blocking” Policy
by Alexander Zubatov
I have previously argued that the current manner in which Medium allows its “block” feature to be used gives an author an effective right to suppress criticism. Here is another glaring instance making my point.
On July 17th, in response to The DiDi Delgado’s piece advocating race-based violence against white cops, I posted a response explaining how her piece is a clear violation of Medium’s rules and should get her banned. In particular, there’s no doubt about the fact that her post violates the very first two rules Medium has:
My response to her quickly got enough “likes” to rise to the top of the responses to her piece. As of today, however, she obviously got worried that someone at Medium would wake up and take action. So she took the cowardly step of blocking me:
The result, as a direct consequence of the way that Medium’s current blocking policy works, is that now, readers of her original post will not see my response linked to it:
So, anyone who is a follower of mine or who otherwise stumbles upon my post by accident or in some other way will still see it on its own page, but of course, this defeats the point of having it be a “response” to the original article. It gives a hate-peddling coward like The DiDi Delgado an effective tool to suppress criticism if that criticism becomes too powerful or popular. It is like having a “comments” section below an article but allowing the author of the article to make negative comments that get too popular disappear. Medium really needs to alter this feature so that it can’t be abused in this way and so that a “block” will only block the user doing the blocking from seeing the blocked author’s writing but will not block other Medium users from seeing that writing, even if it’s a response to a post of the blocking user.
I’d appreciate it if you’d do your best to help me get this message out there. Thanks.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
