How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no chance to understand, and that’s a problem for our society and our ability to resolve the polycrisis we now deal with.
It appears there are lots of factors to get shadow-banned, however regrettably we’re never ever told what “criminal offense” we dedicated nor are we given a chance to safeguard ourselves from the “indictment” in whatever “court” discovered us “guilty.” As in a nightmarish tale right out of Kafka, the powers making the charges, declaring the verdict “guilty as charged” and enforcing the penalty are totally obscured.
Those discovered “guilty” find their secret “conviction” and “sentence” when their income is damaged (i.e. they’re demonetized) and their online presence suddenly decreases or vanishes.
I call this being sent to Digital Siberia. As with the genuine gulag, most of those convicted in the secret digital Star Chamber are innocent of any real crime; their “criminal activity” was challenging the authorized narratives.
Which results in my concern: why was little old marginalized-blogger me shadow-banned? Those responsible are under no responsibility to reveal my “criminal offense,” the proof used against me, or use me a chance to defend myself versus the charges, much less submit an appeal.
My awe at being shadow-banned (everyone in Digital Siberia claims to be innocent, heh) is based upon my fairly restrained online existence, as I stay with the journalistic standards I found out as a free-lancer for mainstream print media: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream/ institutional sources and raise the questions/ build the thesis on those links/ data.
I avoid conspiracy-related subjects (not my interest, not my knowledge) and hot-button ideological/ political cleavages (us vs. them is likewise not my interest). My go-to source for charts and information is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Stats, IRS, etc, and appreciated non-governmental companies (NGOs) such as the Pew Proving Ground, RAND, investment banks, etc.
Offered my adherence to journalistic requirements, I question: how did someone like me get shadow-banned?
The basic cause (or excuse) for being overtly prohibited is “dispersing misinformation.” This charge is never ever particular; something you published “breaches our community requirements,” or comparable broad-brush language.
Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you’re not even notified that your exposure to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.
What are the precise requirements for declaring a link or statement as “false information?” As the twitter files exposed, what certifies as “false information” is continuously moving as a sprawling environment of censors share info and blacklists. This report is well worth reading: The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Leading 50 Organizations To Know (No Hedge).
Not only do we not understand what qualifies as “misinformation,” we likewise do not know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their reaction is to whatever’s been flagged. My associate Nate Hagens, who is equally meticulous about using reliable sources, posted this comment last year:
“It’s both funny and scary. It was described to me today that the brand-new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w proof of checking out non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you regular e.g. Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms classifies your FB content (even if it’s a chicken soup dish) as ‘non-mainstream’.
Big sibling is viewing (and not even believing).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equivalent footing- and the status quo (product growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current course, without a map or strategy.”
The systems that shadow-ban us are totally opaque. Who’s to say that a well-informed human evaluations who’s been prohibited or shadow-banned? Provided the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Online search engine, is that even possible?
It’s popular that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to video game, i.e. manipulate to advance one’s presence.
It’s likewise known that just publishing a link to a website flagged as “misinformation” is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unidentified ways with unidentified consequences.
What I do know is that Of Two Minds was openly identified as “Russian Propaganda” by a bogus organization with no supporting information, PropOrNot in 2016. This front’s blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less offering it the authority of a significant MSM outlet.
One may ask how a respected, relied on newspaper might publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were determined as “Russian Propaganda.” Requirement journalistic protocol requires listing sources, not simply releasing unverified blacklists.
Plainly, the Washington Post ought to have, at a minimum, required a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were identified as “Russian Propaganda” so the Post reporters could check for themselves. At a minimum, the Post ought to have consisted of inks as examples of “Russian Propaganda” for each site on the list. They did neither, a disastrous failure of the most essential journalistic requirements. Yet nobody in the media besides those wrongfully blacklisted even noted or questioned this abject failure.
In effect, the real propaganda was the unsourced, un-investigated blacklist on the front page of the Washington Post.
How did I get on a list of “Russian Propaganda” when I never ever wrote about Russia or anything associated to Russia?
There are two plausible possibilities. One is “regret by association.” I’ve been interviewed by Max Keiser because 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to state, these sources were flagged, as was anybody connected with them. So maybe merely having a link to an interview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned. (Shout-out to Max and Stacy in El Salvador.)
Additionally, possibly questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.
As soon as on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the “criminal offense”– a shadowy “crime” without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.
Shadow-banning manifests in a variety of methods. Readers reported that they couldn’t re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader stated the Department of Commerce would not fill a page from my website, stating it “hazardous,” possibly with the ramification that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms– absurd due to the fact that there is nothing interactive on my sites and therefore no potential source for infections aside from links to genuine sources and adverts served by Investing Channel.
Users of platforms such as Facebook and twitter have actually most likely discovered that your feed is occupied by the exact same “pals” or “folks you follow.” Simply put, the feed you exist with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts/ tweets/ search results page according to parameters that are undetectable to users and regulators.
It’s easy to send flagged accounts to Digital Siberia, and hassle-free to leave them there up until the trouble-maker goes broke.
It’s difficult to chart the level of the shadow-banning, or who’s doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire environment of censorship is undetectable. Remember that in the Soviet gulag, having an “anti-Soviet dream” was enough to get you a tenner (10-year sentence) in the gulag. Here, publishing a flagged link will get you a tenner in Digital Siberia.
When Your Own Government Validates It Paid Censors To Silence You …
In today’s zeitgeist, simply discussing the possibility that the COVID-19 infection escaped from a laboratory led to an instantaneous ban in 2020. How could the possibility that it left from a close-by laboratory devoted to viral research be labeled as “disinformation” when the facts were not yet known?
The response is of course that the lab-escape theory was “politically sensitive” and therefore verboten.
You see the issue: what’s considered “politically delicate” modifications with the wind, therefore the limits of what certifies as “misinformation” have no noticeable or definable edge. Practically anything consequential can suddenly become “politically sensitive” and then stated “false information.” When the standards of what’s a “criminal offense” and the processes of “conviction” are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being “founded guilty” of a shadow-“crime,” we’ve genuinely gone into a Kafkaesque world.
How did somebody like me get shadow-banned? There is no chance to know, and that’s an issue for our society and our capability to resolve the polycrisis we now face.
I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Possibly that’s not that far from truth.
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