48 Hours Later Vox Day Pulls the Plug on SocialGalactic

Announced only two days ago, Vox Day’s Twitter substitute SocialGalactic is already being shut down (“Another curve ball” [Internet Archive link].) The team that works on InfoGalactic, his alt-right revision of the Wikipedia, had joined forces with OneWay to build SocialGalactic on Fediway’s distributed network engine. The platform claimed 2,500 users after the first 48 hours of operation.

Vox Day did not go into detail about the decision. However, in comment a few hours after the initial announcement he had written —

Note that if you’re in the EU, you’re not going to be able to use it until we can resolve the GDPR compliance issue. 

The General Data Protection Regulation  (“GDPR”) regulates data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA), and also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Since Vox himself lives in the EU, such a ban would be no small problem for him.

Day’s Finnish confederate Markku Koponen wrote some more revealing comments. When someone asked how soon people in the EU could gain access he wrote —

Not at this point. Could be never. We’ll have to have a lawyer take a serious look at GDPR. Then we’ll know what it takes, do we need data protection officers, and so forth. There is a chance that the simplest thing is to just block EU altogether (I will of course have backdoor access). We shall see.

…Yes, but that notice is only a small part of it. Blogger [where Vox Day’s blog is hosted] can afford to have the bureaucracy required to allow access, and just nag you with the notice. You still need to comply with the entirety of GDPR and it’s so complicated that there are companies whose whole business is to explain it to you.

…No, I’m just a moderator. But since I’ve had to think about GDPR myself, I tipped Vox off that this is going to be an obvious attack vector for SJWs and it’s best to plug it right from the start.

…There’s always going to be some Soros-paid troll who will spend all his waking hours trying to find some small mistake somewhere in GDPR compliance. Better to just shut it down.

Being unprepared to comply with EU rules may have been the new platform’s Achilles heel.

Amazon Reopens Castalia House’s KDP Account

Castalia House’s Amazon Kindle Digital Publishing account was restored yesterday within hours after Vox Day told readers it had been taken down (see “Amazon Terminates Vox Day’s Castalia House Account”.) The problems were caused by Castalia’s Collapsing Empire parody Corrosion by “Johan Kalsi” with the look-alike cover, which has brought Day’s business into conflict with Amazon’s rules many times since the book came out in 2017.

Collapsing Empire author John Scalzi seems to have had this news in mind when he tweeted on Thursday —

Although the Amazon account was reopened, Markku Koponen of Finland, where the Castalia House entity is based, told readers of Vox Day’s blog that the “Kalsi” book will no longer be sold on Amazon.

But the sales had dropped so low on it (because people seem to connect it only with the Scalzi events, which isn’t really fair. Again, it’s an actual, serious book) that removing that tool from them had more value than having the title there. And it’s still available on our own site, from which we keep 100% of the revenue instead of 70%.

And he said they have asked Audible to take down the audiobook.

Vox Day also contacted File 770 “to set the record straight,” saying —

  1. CORROSION by Johan Kalsi was cleared of being “misleading” no less than 7 times by the highest-level managers at KDP. The previous time it was depublished by the Quality Assurance employee, in September 2018, it was republished before we even received the email telling us it had been depublished.
  2. The reason we were given for our account was terminated was a claim of copyright infringement. This claim was incorrect and was subsequently acknowledged to have been incorrect when our account was restored.
  3. What Amazon did yesterday affected more than 60 authors, and any author who was feeling schadenfreude would do well to keep in mind that not every employee at Amazon with access to their account is fully in agreement with them either. We are very far from the first to have our account terminated, even if it was only for 20 hours in our case.
  4. We sold more copies of Corrosion via our direct store yesterday than we had sold in the previous three months on Amazon. We’ve sold even more copies of it today. That is why we decided not to republish it on KDP and why we will remove it from Audible as well. It’s simply not worth the potential conflict.

When one of his fans encouraged him to initiate legal action against Amazon. Vox Day replied —

No. We’re already in a significant legal battle with Indiegogo. We will not take on any additional conflict unless it is forced on us. Nor are we interested in going to war against our own distribution channel.

Day was referring IndieGoGo’s action last October, shutting down Arkhaven’s current fundraiser for Alt-Hero: Q, and refunding backers’ money (see “After Bleeding Cool Interviews Vox Day, IndieGoGo Axes Latest Alt-Hero Comic Campaign”.) Arkhaven is Castalia’s comics imprint.