So far I’ve had to switch email providers from Mailchimp and I’ve had my corporate account on Medium shadow banned twice all for mentioning blockchain or cryptocurrency at all in articles. My Mailchimp emails were legitimately gathered and I had a less than 1% spam report. My unsubscribe rate was also around 1%. My open rate was 20% and my mail list was gathered from scratch on our website. I shared company news about our blockchain startup on a monthly basis. Regardless, our Mailchimp account was indefinitely banned for being crypto related.
At least in the case of Mailchimp you know when you are banned. For Medium they don’t tell you. The only way you can find out if your account is suspended is by logging out and then checkout your article or in my case by seeing the suspension notice in a Facebook post. This is pretty unfortunate since we had an article posted on the front page of our website for weeks and we have no way of knowing how long the account was suspended. I won’t mention the name of my company because there is some likelihood even mentioning the name is ground for suspension. It does have ‘chain’ in the title.
So that brings me to my question. Why? I’ve been to dozens of blockchain and crypto currency events. Every day I see crypto currency and bitcoin news on CNN and others. Why are these companies still afraid of blockchain and crypto-currency technology? My company tracks artwork to prove authenticity. It has nothing to do with contraband or nefarious activities. In fact I would argue that most blockchain and crypto currency technologies today are benign. Just a quick search on the internet produces these top blockchain companies:
Ripple
OmiseGo
Ethereum
CosenSys
IBM
Bank of America
Oracle
…just to name a few. Gone are the days when blockchain meant silk road. So what’s with the auto banning and worse, shadow banning of blockchain and crypto tech articles? I ask because I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. Blockchain is hot, but it’s also still taboo. I’m the last person to jump on the conspiracy band wagon. I prefer to explain things with pure laziness, but for this one I don’t really have a good explanation. Blockchain his hot, sometimes it’s not, but it’s dirty at the same time.
I mentioned crypto-currency and blockchain a number of times in this article. I even mentioned ‘startup’ and a few other scary spam words. This is a good experiment. Will this article be banned? Let’s find out.
