While the timeline of the public part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine sometimes starts with his talk at WordCamp US on September 20, there were two events that happened before that. On September 17, he published a post on his own website that included criticism of WP Engine. That post was promoted in the admin dashboard of every WordPress because he decided years ago that the posts on his personal blog should be included in the “news” feed of WordPress. Two days later, another website included in the “news” feed of WordPress ran a post simply repeating lots of the information from his post. That post started this way:

WordCamp US 2024 is in full swing, and Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, shared his thoughts on a powerful philosophy driving Open Source.

What wasn’t disclosed in the post is that the author of the post, only identified as Jyolsna, is directly employed by Matt Mullenweg through his investment, vehicle Audrey Capital. It also wasn’t disclosed that the “news” outlet that story ran on the WP Tavern is owned by Matt Mullenweg. The lack of disclosure isn’t a new issue.

On September 26, the author wrote this in response to a question on how people can trust the WP Tavern when Matt Mullenweg owns it: “Till today, Matt has never asked me to cover or omit any news.” That is necessarily reassuring. It might be that he hired that person knowing that they would write what he wants. So how did the person get the job? By competing for it.

Back in February, Matt Mullenweg announced he was launching a competition to find two new writers for the WP Tavern. That seems like a good way to find people that would write what he wants. Only one person was selected, suggesting that no one else was in line with what he wanted to pass that test.

While doing some research recently, we ran across one of the post they wrote during the competition. Here are some of the comments left on the post (which were even allowed to be shown):

Honestly, this feels like an advertisement, rather than news. It’s not the kind of stuff I follow the Tavern for, and hope that there isn’t more of this type of story planned for the future.

I share the same sentiment. It definitely feels more like an advertorial than an editorial piece. However, when future WordPress hosting offers are discussed, the perspective may change. In isolation, it’s clearly advertising. ????

That looks so much like Advertisement that it actually is advertisement.
And still fails to show why would it be worth to pay extra for the WP hosting, the “amazing new features” are not new and may even “advance backwards”, as Bluehost allows more websites on their normal basic plan and only one in the WP basic plan

The post was covering an offering from Bluehost. The parent of Bluehost is Newfold, which is an investor in the Matt Mulleweg run Automattic. The hosting solution is powered by WP Cloud, which is an Automattic brand. There is no disclosure of the connection between the WP Tavern’s ownership and the parties mentioned there.

To bring us back to the start of this post. That solution from a partnership between Bluehost and Automattic seems like it might be related to the Automattic plan that appears to have eventually led to Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine.

The WP Tavern’s author’s coverage of extortion campaign isn’t exactly unbiased. They wrote a long post about Automattic’s largely non-news worthy cease and desist letter, but didn’t write a post about WP Engine’s that first exposed the extortion campaign. They still haven’t written a post on WP Engine’s lawsuit despite being filed on October 2.