Blocked from sending our weekly newsletter

By Rob Woodward – TruePublica: In the month of May (up to this morning), TruePublica had 599,106 visitors who read 958,569 pages of content. The site experienced a DOS or DDOS attack and prevented probably another 100,000 or so people accessing stories about Dominic Cummings and the shenanigans of the Boris Johnson government in the midst of a public health and economic crisis.

In the space of two months, TruePublica’s subscriber’s list has doubled. This week the newsletter was stopped from going to subscribers by the email service that we pay for – for no conceivable reason that we can make out. We have broken none of their rules or laws that exist in the UK or EU.

At TruePublica we took the view that GDPR rules were weak anyway and not just protect subscribers from being exploited but fully delete anyone who no longer wishes to receive emails. The TP website does not use itself as a dragnet to garner visitors data and we employ not one single tool to do that other than counting the numbers of visitors. And we have, in our existence never sold or divulged a single subscriber or visitor to a third party. We believe that privacy is fundamental to our civil liberty.

We know for a fact that the newsletter goes to a number of desks inside parliament. This is not hard to work out as their email address literally ends with .parliament

We know that the government spends large sums of taxpayers money on Facebook (and Twitter) – and so we are unable to publicly use FB without handing over passport, home addresses and bank statements. We have refused to divulge these details for obvious reasons.

Last week, a data analyst contacted us and stated that although our twitter account has 15 per cent more followers, our Tweet reach had dropped substantially. Not only that we are told that our Tweets are not organically shared as they should be.

We know that other independent websites in Britain are suffering from the same experiences online. Even mainstream journalists are being blocked from asking questions at press briefings. Some are refused completely from even attending and others complain that they are no longer invited to all manner of lobby meetings, interviews, briefings, conferences and so on.

Despite the physical blocks to silence TruePublica, its audience continues to grow every month and as it does so, the attempts to stop what we report appear to get ever stronger.

It is no longer possible to say that Facebook, Twitter, the newsletter and DDOS attacks are somehow unrelated. It has become very clear to me that TruePublica is now being deliberately targeted – but we don’t know who by.

We don’t have the resources to fight back. They know this.

Even though we announced that we will no longer take donations from the public – I am more than grateful for those individuals who insisted, donated anyway and sent strong messages of encouragement. We have had lots of other messages of support.

However, on Tuesday 30th June, unless the Johnson government changes its posture – a hard Brexit will be confirmed. TruePublica will stay online to that date and then we will have to call it a day.

 

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