Blogspot Community Guidelines - Something Didn't Like Something

 

I've had this blog for around 15 years now and I ran into something new. For the first time that I can recollect, one of my articles was flagged and de-posted based on a Community Guidelines violation. I understand that I talk about firearms a lot and that for many people, its a taboo subject. I live in the US where its deeply apart of our culture. Even then, many people here have a distain for the subject. I had wondered if it was someone being malicious.

What I thought was interesting is that the article in question was my explanation of why the .357 Magnum cartridge was the best candidate for what I call the General Purpose cartridge and that others call the Universal Cartridge. When I saw the notice, I had assumed it was for something like selling arms or whatever. After reviewing, I found that the article had been flagged under the Malware and Viruses policy.

I went back over the post in the HTML view to see if there was something that someone slipped into my post as in someone got in to my account. I didn't see anything.

In that post, I had put my source citations for the South Carolina DNR study and the Guns magazine archive. Neither of these are bad. I had wonder that if the system automatically tagged my post because of a PDF link. When I tried to browse to the Guns Magazine URL, my browser said it was unsafe. I am using Chrome in this instance.

I haven't been able to confirm yet but I suspect that because Google, or Alphabet, owns Blogspot/Blogger, their Safe Domain system triggered a Malware alert on my blog and pulled the article. It's also why Chrome said I was doing something dangerous. I don't think someone specifically targeted my but the Google system triggered a system wide alert.

I am still waiting on a manual review but I've removed the URL citation from the article.

Update: The edit was accepted. If I can remember to do so, I will re-add the URL after seeing if the warning has been cleared.