Blaze is another wonderful feature of WordPress, a reasonably priced way to expand the reach of a cute cat video or recipe. Try to publicize the current reality and see how things change.

I had come to the point of thinking Blaze auto-rejected political posts, but then it let some innocuous reality-based posts pass. Recently I tried to get Blaze to publicize The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men And Women Do Nothing. The ad was rejected.

I spent a half hour in a chat room with a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” The people assigned to this chat room are generally helpful. This time, utterly useless and insane. Apparently my ad was, in Dean Wormer’s words, on double secret probation.

I began with the question “Why was the ad rejected.” I was thrown into AI Bot Interative Hell, as performed for a half hour by a human being. Essentially: we know why and we’re not going to tell you. Just read all 5,000 words of Blaze’s terms of service, and guess which one applies.

Yes Blaze is a separate company, but you wouldn’t know that from the WordPress website. Can someone at Blaze tell me which term I violated? “Nope. Its all in the TOS. Guess which one applies!” Oh, and “A human being checks every rejection.”

So, I tried to think as stupidly as an LLM. Since I am a human being it was relatively easy. [1] Once I turned my brain off it was obvious: hanging was on the no-no list. Regardless of the context. And then we come to the human being, who might be expected to recognize the content was not a threat, but rather the words of a founding father. I can only guess why this “got past” them.[2]

All I know for sure is: quote is gone, ad goes on.

Footnotes

[1] Remember when Secretary of Stupid Pete Hegseth ordered his minions to purge all Department of DEFENSE websites of any hint of any contributions to America’s defense by anyone who wasn’t a Straight White American Male? His crackerjack team of idiots proved themselves almost as incompetent at creating prompts as their AI was at implementing them. The Enloa Gay (the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima) was scrubbed, as was Jackie Robinson, Navajo Code Talkers and numerous other pages that were restored after public shaming.

[2] Yes Boomer. Sadly, given the state of American education (I would expect more from the Indian call center agents, who know way more about our history than we know about theirs) it is likely the checker thought that Ben Franklin was a gansta rapper whose face is on the $100 bill. Or that he discovered electricity. He did not; as I told my 8^th graders for a decade, he discovered lightning was electricity. And that his quote was from 2026, instead of 1776, and was not making a threat, but was describing a threat.