A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.

I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.

First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:

The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?

Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”

A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:

We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.

I threw a flag on that play:

I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.

I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.

If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.

The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.

When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:

The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.

Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”

Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.

I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:

Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.

Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.

The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.

I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.