Please see update at the bottom of this post.

Many Catholic and/or conservative blogs are being mysteriously flagged and their proprietors are being locked out of their own blogs without reason.

Happy Catholic has been marked as spam and frozen. Red State Maryland the same. And if you don’t order a review your blog will simply be terminated in 20 days. The Deacon’s Bench and the Paragraph Farmer. Vita Nostra in Ecclesia was just flagged as well.

This reminds some of efforts to take down pro-Hillary blogs during the divisive primary but now this is happening to Catholic and/or conservative blogs with curious frequency.

Someone or something stinks in blogdom. It seems to be a concerted effort to report certain blogs as spam in order to shut them down for days at a time.

This notice seems to be the standard note being sent out to bloggers being shut down.

Hello,

Your blog at…has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID

Your blog will be deleted within 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and you’ll be unable to publish posts during this time. After we receive your request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We
sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

It seems like it’s very easy to report a blog as a “spammer” and this could all be a collosal coincidence but some are thinking that there’s more to the story.

Update: Blogger indicates that this is a system wide issue with many blogs being incorrectly marked as spam. No indication of how long it will take to fix the issue or what caused the problem. It remains unknown if specific blogs were targeted or not. However, it does not seem to be limited to Catholic or Conservative blogs only.

P.S. For a little humor on the situation read, “A Blogalypse Now?”