Savvy internet users already know of the shadowban, where a service hides a user’s content from everyone except that person. However, services can also shadow remove individual comments. You might receive replies to some content while other commentary appears to fall flat. Such lonely, childless comments may truly have been uninteresting, or they may have been secretly suppressed. Moreover, many moderators suppress significantly more content than they admit.
If anyone best understood the harms of secret suppression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did. He survived the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps where millions died. In his epic The Gulag Archipelago, he argued that the Soviet security apparatus based all of its arrests on Article 58, which forbid “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Police relied on this anti-free speech code to imprison whomever they wished on false charges. Article 58 thus removed truth and transparency from the justice system.
But we have a role to play too. Left unchallenged, a censorial Internet enslaves both users and moderators alike to become ideological warriors. Ironically, we have promoted communications systems that do not foster good communication. But good communication is essential to well-functioning communities, so we must do something. The question is what to do or say. Unfortunately, the easy route of framing the problem as “us versus them” would merely strengthen existing power players.
You know we're all leftists here right? The nicest description of Solzhenitsyn is that he was an anti-Communist, a Monarchist, and a Nationalist who made shit up for propaganda purposes. And there are a lot of much less kind things i could say about him if I was of a mind to dig up some citations.
The article also conflates Nazis with Communists and quotes a guy we have specific emojis for in the first paragraph
.Why are you posting this here? This is just anti-communist trash. It belongs in the
with Solzhenitsyn.Solzehnitsyn made media appearances supporting fascist Franco and gave lectures excoriating the west for not bombing Vietnam enough, and he was deservedly sent to labor camp in the first place for advocating rapprochement with Hitler.
Robert is a software developer and founder of Reveddit.com. He is originally from Connecticut and currently resides in Taiwan with his wife, daughter, and their Formosan mountain dog.
This guy is a fucking idiot lmao. If you want to read a critique of Reddit's censorship that actually engages with WHO is doing it, and what their MOTIVES are, read Alan Macleod's piece in MintPressNews: Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It.
Censorship on the Internet is fucking obvious. "Literally 1984" :19::84: is not a groundbreaking insight. And to lean on Elon Musk's analysis in the first paragraph, then lean on a gulaged NAZI COLLABORATOR for dramatic effect throughout the rest of the article is PURE fucking Reddit. The most recent version of this dipshit's magnum opus has a foreword by Jordan Peterson for fuck's sake
.Nazi sympathizer should’ve been grateful to be allowed to live.
If you want to read a fantasy novel, go with the classic Tolkiens instead of whatever Solzhenitsyn decided to shit out the morning he wrote that paragraph.
How ironic, then, that you are going to be censored and we will all laugh
The council of censors has adjourned with a preliminary ruling that it would be a superior punishment to leave this post up.
"Hexbear has once again been criticized by Amnesty for their policy of leaving bad posts up to be dunked on."
Wait, why am I being censored? Why are you laughing? Are you referring to the tone policing that is going on here?
, 
even