(Justin Deschamps) As you might’ve noticed the Stillness in the Storm newsletter stopped being sent to your inbox. The Story behind why this happened shows a compelling case for Big Tech censorship of alternative media. What you’ll see in this article is a point for point presentation of how and why this happened. This may prove once and for all that ideas “they” don’t want you to know about are being censored.
Update — August 25th 2020: I have good news. Mailerlite, after I had several communications with them, decided to allow us to use their platform. We hope that they will honor their word, our agreement, and not censor us unilaterally like Mailchimp seems to have done. You can sign up for the newsletter using this link: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/o4j6e4.
Related “Trust the Plan” Isn’t What You Think It Is
by Justin Deschamps, August 22nd, 2020
Mailchimp is the service I use to send email newsletters and other updates out to the thousands of readers who have subscribed to Stillness in the Storm.
We’ve been using Mailchimp for over three years and have a flawless record.
They closed our account on Friday the 21st without any prior notice or warning.
I received a short email from them letting us know.
Reviewing Our Mailchimp’s Account Health
You might be wondering, did we violate any of their policies?
I contacted Mailchimp and they have yet to get back to me about the specifics of why they suspended our account.
Let’s review some of the facts to get a sense of what might have happened.
Firstly, we’ve used the service since 2017 without any problems whatsoever. We’ve never had a warning or misused the service at any time during our over 3-year relationship with Mailchimp.
Our use of the Mailchimp platform hasn’t changed since last year. We post about 12 to 20 posts a day. We use exactly the same format, and post almost exactly the same type of content, with the exception of more political posts than other topics.
I pulled reports across a seven day period, one sample in 2020 (just before our account was suspended), and one in 2019 in the same date range to gather the following numbers.
The unsubscribe, bounce, and spam rates have actually gone down in 2020 because we gained about 7,000 more subscribers (assessed by pulling a one-week sample size from August 13th to 20th, comparing 2020 to 2019)
This means there are less unsubscribe, bounce, and spam reports per unit volume of daily email subscribers in 2020 as compared to 2019. And this means, when it comes to Mailchimp’s standards, we’re a healthier account than we were a year ago. We have fewer spam reports, more subscribers, fewer unsubscribers, and fewer spam reports with respect to the total number of subscribers on our list in 2020 than we did in 2019.
The conclusion? Mailchimp should think our account is better and less of a risk in 2020 than it was in 2019.
Second, Mailchimp’s policies aren’t very specific when it comes to clear cut reasons as to why an account can be suspended or terminated. They discuss them here, stating obvious reasons like we have to use the service in compliance with applicable laws. This, of course, we’ve done. It’s pretty standard stuff, and we adhere to it as we have done since the opening of our account in 2017.
Specifically, we use the double-opt-in method for confirming subscriptions to the newsletter.
What does that mean?
If you want to subscribe to our newsletter, you place your email in the form to sign up. Then you confirm you want to receive our newsletter by clicking a button that’s sent to the email you used. You would have to have access to the email, meaning you can sign in, and therefore are assumed to be the owner or authorized user.
In short, the double opt-in system is industrywide protection against unwanted emails (spam). (Of course, if you’re email’s been hacked, that’s a different story. But this is the exception not the rule.)
Third, their policy says that if our newsletter is reported for abuse too often then this would be a cause for suspension. Abuse here means people reporting an email as spam.
How did we fair insofar as spam reports?
I pulled the last 7 days of reports from Mailchimp, and we received one abuse complaint on the 16th, 17th, and 19th of August, from three different email addresses.
(One of those addresses is an older woman who has a hard time using technology—I know because she emails me about once a week and I help her troubleshoot problems. The point here is that she probably reported abuse by accident, as she clearly wants to read our newsletter or she wouldn’t contact us asking about problems she’s having accessing our content.)
When it comes to abuse reports, three in a seven day period is hardly a cause for alarm, especially when we send our email newsletter out to over 12,900 people every day.
According to CampaignMonitor.com the industry standard is 0.05%.
Our spam complaint rate limit is 0.5%, which is very high for industry standards. That’s why we start sending you warning emails well before you reach that percentage, and why accounts are automtically suspended when that limit is exceeded.
If we calculate our email campaign reports, assuming we had one spam report per day (which as I just showed we only received three in a seven day period, meaning this calculation is an overestimate), that puts our spam report rate at 0.008%—well below the industry standard rate.
What about comparing numbers from last year?
I went into the report system in Mailchimp and pulled our stats for the same dates last year, August 13th to 20th 2019. We had the same number of abuse reports, three. And all our other stats are proportionally the same.
This suggests the reason for our suspension likely isn’t because of people reporting our newsletters as spam.
Book Internet Censorship: Protecting Citizens or Trampling Freedom?
Fourth, the number of emails being opened is another stat that email service providers (ESPs) use to rank the health of an account. If it’s too low, they can suspend the account.
How did our’s fair?
Our open rate across the 13th to 20th of August 2020 was 17.41%
That might seem kind of low, but for an industry like ours, which is media, publishing, and entertainment, that’s just below average.
CampaignMonitor.com reports that the average is about 18.07% (calculated by adding the seven-day figures and dividing by seven).
In this instance, our open rate is well within the standard limits, suggesting our open rate, and the health of our account likely wasn’t the cause of our suspension.
What could be the cause for the suspension?
Having been in the media publishing business since 2013, I can report that my social media accounts and website, in general, have been subject to what’s called shadow banning.
This is when a service like Google, Facebook, or Twitter secretly restricts the serving of our posts and articles.
For social media, even if you’re following our account, like our Facebook Like Page, you might not see our posts. If you share our posts, other people in your friend/follow list won’t see them.
For search engines like Google, it means even if we have an article with good SEO ranking, Google will restrict the listing so it doesn’t show up in the search results.
In early 2017, 70% of our traffic came from Facebook or Google. But in mid-2017, after our Facebook Like Page was randomly suspended, without notice, the visit rates from Facebook dropped to less than 10% within a week. Google was a bit slower in reduction, dropping to less than 1% since mid-2017’s rates of about 30%.
Mailerlite Auto-Restricts Our New Account
Yesterday, on the 21st of August, after receiving the above-notice from Mailchimp of account suspension, I began searching for an alternative.
I found Mailerlite, a similar service that is basically a carbon copy of Mailchimp.
I spent five hours setting it all up, building an RSS-to-email newsletter campaign.
I imported our subscriber contact list. Like Mailchimp, they require us to pay a monthly fee to send a newsletter. I was paying $150 a month with Mailchimp, which went through on the 9th of August, 11 days before we got our account suspended.
I paid Mailerlite the $75 needed to start using the service. But I was told within the campaign setup screens of Mailerlite that the account would need to be reviewed before my email campaign would start.
I sent the account over for review and within less than 15 minutes, I received an email saying our account “didn’t pass [the] test.”
I emailed Mailerlite, asking for specifics.
They didn’t address any of my questions and sent what looks like a canned response.
Without jumping to any conclusions, I took the email at face value and sent the latest campaign report from Mailchimp, which shows that 17.41% of emails sent were opened by our readers.
It’s entirely possible that this response from Mailerlite is completely standard. Or it could be that Stillness in the Storm has been placed on a blacklist, that is hidden from the public but shared amongst ESPs like Mailchimp and Mailerlite.
I haven’t heard back from Mailerlite, but if they refuse to let us use their service, given we comply with the 3% open rate, this suggests we’ve been blacklisted and our information censored.
Update. I did receive word from Mailerlite that we can use their email service now. I hope that they honor this agreement and do not close the account without any notice or warning like Mailchimp did.
Why censored? As we’ll show below, because of what we post—the information itself isn’t something Big Tech or the forces behind them want people to see.
Book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom
The Censorship of Alternative Media has Skyrocketed in 2020
QAnon associated censorship and de-platforming, in particular, has been openly revealed.
Here are a few mainstream media articles talking about it.
Twitter Takedown Targets QAnon Accounts
Facebook Removes 790 QAnon Groups to Fight Conspiracy Theory
Do we post QAnon?
Yes, we do. We even make merch to help spread awareness and raise a bit of capital to pay costs on the site.
As a matter of fact, we started posting about Q all the way back in October 2017, when Q first started posting on 4Chan.
Here’s another interesting clue. Our Twitter account was suspended on the 13th of August, one amongst thousands of others.
Did Twitter tell us why?
No. Just like with Mailchimp, we received no specific notice, whatsoever, as to the reason why our account was suspended.
The account was the @sitsshow account we’ve had since July 2013, when the Stillness in the Storm project began. We had a backup account @stillnessstorm, which was also suspended. Apparently, twitter reserves the right to suspend accounts that have backups.
OK. Is this fair? No. But if this is their policy, then I can deduce that this was likely their justified reason.
But wait, it gets more interesting.
One of our staff also had her Twitter account suspended a few days later. She would post occasionally about Q but not nearly as much as we did. The interesting part is that all three of these accounts, @sitsshow, @stillnessstorm, and @pinkpearlv369, had the website link https://stillnessinthestorm.com/ in the website account info section of the Twitter profile.
This link of our website being in the profile of all three accounts seems to suggest Twitter suspended any account listing Stillness in the Storm as the website.
Final Thoughts
Add all this up and what do you get? A compelling case that Stillness in the Storm and those who work with us are being targeted for censorship.
As a researcher versed in epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, and the system of critical thought underpinning investigations and law enforcement, I’ll be the first to say this is hardly a watertight case of malicious and outright intentional censorship.
Perhaps I missed something in my review of the data. Perhaps there’s a TOS or policy violation I’m not aware of. But since our use of these platforms hasn’t changed in over 3 years, it seems unlikely.
Theoretically, it seems like a fair bet to say we might have had our Mailchimp account suspended because we post about QAnon. This is prohibited information according to the thought-police. Hence, the overlords likely asked their bridge trolls in Big Tech to censor our accounts.
One last piece of data that might be a clue in QAnon-linked censorship. We posted the following article about Trump’s response to a QAnon question the Thursday before our account got suspended.
Trump “Praises” QAnon, When Asked, Responds “We are saving the world.”
How can you follow us now?
At this point, we no longer have an email service to send our newsletters. We had to start using our old service FeedBurner, which is not capable of importing our total list of email subscribers. That said you can sign up yourself by using the following link.
As frustrating as this can be I actually think it’s a badge of honor.
After all the research I’ve done over the past 10 years, There’s a reason why censorship of information is important. It’s because when you’re dealing with a deep state and a criminal element within the government they have to keep the truth suppressed or the people will discover what’s really going on.
In a way, our de-platforming suggests that the information we share on Stillness in the Storm is at least in part a threat to the powers that should not be.
I can only hope that whatever efforts are being taken within our government by what has been called an alliance of white hats can one day restore balance and justice to the world.
Until then, keep searching for and spreading the truth.
“You only take flak when you’re over the target.”
– Justin
Book Maxims of Divine Law
Book Tara: Covenant of the Celts and Jeremiah (6th Century BCE)
The preceding is a Stillness in the Storm original creation. Please share freely.
About The Author
Justin Deschamps has been a truth seeker all his life, studying physics, psychology, law, philosophy, and spirituality, and working to weave these seemingly separate bodies of information into a holistic tapestry of ever expanding knowledge. Justin is a student of all and a teacher to some, sharing what he has discovered with those who are ready and willing to take responsibility for making the world a better place. The goal of his work is to help himself and others become better truth-seekers, and in doing so, form a community of holistically minded individuals capable of creating world healing projects for the benefit of all life—what has been called The Great Work. Check out his project Stillness in the Storm to find some of his work. Follow on Twitter @justinstillness, Follow on Parler, Facebook Stillness in the Storm, and minds.com.
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This article appeared first on Stillness in the Storm.
This article (Anatomy of Big Tech Censorship: Deplatforming and Shadow Banning of Stillness in the Storm (Mailchimp)) originally appeared on StillnessintheStorm.com and is free and open source. You have permission to share or republish this article in full so long as attribution to the author and stillnessinthestorm.com
Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?
Censorship of information is critically important for the Deep State to maintain their false reality paradigm, which is the foundation of the mind control system used to enslave the individual and society at large. The preceding information reveals one such method the powers that be are using to censor information. Properly understood, one can begin the process of liberating their mind from false conceptions of reality, particularly those incomplete bits of knowledge that if contemplated fully, would activate the truth-seeking urge and result in the development of mental autonomy—critical thinking and discernment skills.
– Justin
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools.
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammatical mistake? Send an email to [email protected], with the error and suggested correction, along with the headline and url. Do you think this article needs an update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.
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Embedded Throughout This Article
Thanks for warning about mailchimp and mailerlite!
Some how the links to a page a few days ago would not go through. It was adding a l to the website link. Just FYI. Seems ok now. Here is an example.
https://stilllnessinthestorm.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=61664091c0a671ae18088b9c8&id=4af3d03aea&e=6e5c609f2e