Yet another case of censorship

In the midst of these hard times, locked up in our rooms, we seem to increasingly access reality through the internet, but we forget that what we find there is anything but impartial, further from the objective than our already biased cognition.

My story is yet another (among so many this year) Orwellian cliché of living a lie. I realized I’ve been shadow-banned on YouTube, what this means in my specific case (as there are multiple variations), is that when I write a comment on any video, it will be removed almost instantly, in around fifteen seconds. It’s called shadow-banning because nobody informs me that that’s happened and after seemingly having commented something as simple as “hello” and closed the video, I go away and never realized I’ve been censored.

Following a lecture series, and after leaving several comments (I remember around seven or eight), I thought to myself “Boy, I’m that unpopular that nobody ever answers me?” So I started feeling uneasy, and remembered that I had watched a video that was censored because it shared different opinions that disrupted the status quo (Bret Weinstein on vaccines, the full podcast was taken down by Youtube but the clip remains). I didn’t comment on that video, just liked it. But it raised a thought. What if…

So I looked up how to check your comment history, went through the list, and boom, it was pretty much empty, only two of the comments in the lecture series were there. It was a thing! I tried remembering what else I had written in the recent past. I had left a sort of romantic mini story in some vlogger’s latest entry, feelings involved, I was bummed when no reply came my way, but I wasn’t really expecting her to read it, she was too popular. But that was gone too. She couldn’t have read it because it never got to destination.

I don’t know when it started happening, I don’t know why some of the comments went through but most didn’t. I started doing some testing and found The Verge’s article on how they instantly delete comments that include the Chinese characters for “communist bandit” (共匪) and “50-cent party” (五毛), I won’t comment on that (sad emoji), but tested it and they deleted it. Wrote “Thanks for your work” and they deleted it. Wrote “hello” and they deleted it. It seemed there was a tier in which some of my words were accepted but then they moved me onto a different harsher tier and none of the comments were accepted anymore. I’ve seen people being on a “softer” one in which they see what they wrote but nobody else will. Actually, I don’t know what’s worse, that makes it harder to ever realize you’re banned.

They won’t tell you why they did it, when it started happening, how long it will last, what exactly they’re censoring and what is okay. The frustration was high, the freedom of speech non-existent, the The Truman Show feeling of having been speaking to a wall for potentially months… that’s hard to describe.

I have another account, but it’s connected to the main one, so guess what, it’s also shadow-banned. There’s no way of contacting support for that issue that I’ve been able to find, even while being a Premium user (pay to win or pay to lose?) It’s really hard to start over, if you want to create a new account (which probably goes against their policies anyway), they ask for your phone number, so the new account can be linked to the old one that way, or through your credit card if you want Premium, or through constantly logging in through the same IP adress or device, you basically need a whole new identity to be able to use their services freely.

Well, it’s the rules of the game, their game, they create them, you just follow. They need to cater to the big wallets selling ads that support the whole thing. Sure, but those rules are hidden, they change all the time, and they’re prone to ulterior motives. Who wants to play that game? Millions and millions, because they don’t know. How many dozens of Terms and Conditions have we accepted because they’re so purposefully annoying to read and understand? And what are the ramifications of that when their powerful monopoly controls the code in our phones, browsers, social media, the whole internet pretty much? And our options? Follow the white rabbit? The article wouldn’t be complete without a The Matrix reference, of course.

Morpheus says “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” That’s the Semmelweis Reflex bias. But unplugged people do exist, there’s been many reported cases on Reddit, Quora, Google Support, etc. since 2017, and there’s general consensus that it’s gotten a lot tougher since the beginning of the pandemic, just search for “why are my youtube comments being deleted?” or “youtube shadowban.”

It’d be easier to think it was a bug, some wishful blindness instead of shaking up our narrative even more; the algorithm fucked up, a certain keyword in my comment triggered the whole thing, and I got put into that pool. But that only goes so far, and things can get serious, maybe the algorithm thought my poem was spam because I pasted it from my editor and it was too long or whatever the reason, so they prevented me from nurturing my virtual love aspirations, fair enough. But when you actively shape the public discourse by blocking people like Bret Weinstein from telling their version of the story, shit can go very wrong. From the pretty grim gray tones of echo chambers filtering and selecting to only show you more of what tickles your fancy, “Just click this, click and everything will be alright” to the darker blacks of “This is the truth and you won’t oppose it.” Maybe it’s time for that legendary rebirth, to get up, and say:

“No.”