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Slick­Stack
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MailChimp Banned Over Censorship Concerns

Starting immediately, SlickStack has begun warning WordPress sites that have MailChimp software installed that we will begin banning it by default at some point in the near future.

(Note: users are always free to install their own plugin blacklist.txt file, instead of using the default one.)

This is in accordance with our official goals of maximizing free speech and website portability, and helping users to avoid implementing services or extensions that will likely present conflicts later on in their website’s life cycle, esp. regarding stability, security, or portability.

Over the past few years, MailChimp’s “leftist” activism and Orwellian censorship has gotten more and more bold. Among many others who have been arbitrarily banned for political reasons include Stefan Molyneux, March for Trump, VICE founder Gavin McInnes, and Alex Jones, and even a random women’s issues blogger named Emma.

Ironically after Alex Jones was banned, his InfoWars emails are now being powered by the Amazon AWS cloud, meaning that the smaller independent MailChimp is literally just pushing users into Big Tech services instead, or creating totally new IaaS services from the ground up, like Parler, Gab, and many others.

In the past few months surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, MailChimp’s far-left founder Ben Chestnut, stepped up these efforts drastically by announcing they would be deplatforming any newsletter or organization that was distributing information that they personally believed was inaccurate, esp. politically. In essence, it is yet another effort of online tech platforms to silence and destroy conservative or right-leaning publications and ideas.

Almost immediately the affects were seen as the Northern Virginia Tea Party was permanently banned from MailChimp in November 2020.

Obviously, this unpredictability is horrible for online business.

For example, if your team spent months or years perfecting your website’s lead generation system and opt-in features to grow a newsletter or community, and then you got banned overnight for political reasons, it would throw not only your backend software into immediate disarray but also require redesigning your frontend and entire “funnel” from the top to bottom in certain cases. This could end up costing a small company not only thousands of hours of their time, but thousands of dollars in web development services as well.

Since helping users avoid lock-in to certain stack services or products is one of our main objectives, and allowing websites to switch to a new hosting cloud or WordPress theme/plugin on a moment’s notice with minimal technical debt is of top concern to SlickStack, we felt this decision couldn’t wait any longer.

Foolishly, MailChimp doesn’t seem to realize that newsletters especially are an easily-replicated IaaS commodity.

About the Author

Jesse Nickles

Jesse is the lead developer for the SlickStack project and also for HoverCraft, the accompanying free WordPress theme. He has been customizing WordPress for both personal websites and SEO clients for over 15+ years, with a focus on simplicity and longevity.

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One thought on "MailChimp Banned Over Censorship Concerns"

  1. Maggew says:

    Maybe 10 years ago it was worth using Mailchimp but now they are just overpriced and not worth using. SO many better alternatives for transactional email.

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