Exposing the Hidden Battle of Shadow Banning and Its Effect on Online Discourse with Robert Hawkins

Embark on a revelatory journey with us as social entrepreneur Robert Hawkins joins the conversation to unravel the concealed practice of shadow banning. Together, we dissect how this form of censorship, often invisible to its victims, is molding our digital conversations and potentially narrowing the worldviews we're exposed to online. Our dialogue takes you behind the veil of online moderation, laying bare the silent war waged on free expression, and the resultant echo chambers that both left and right can find themselves trapped within.

Wrestling with the complexities of the First Amendment in the realm of omnipotent social platforms, this episode probes the fine line between the right to speak and the power to silence. We confront the perplexing legal landscape that governs digital communication, pondering whether private entities have the right to exclude voices and how this shapes our online milieu.

The finale of our exploration serves as a warning, highlighting the subtle yet profound impacts of shadow banning on community dialogue and the uphill battle content moderators face in their quest to curate the online space. We leave you not just with a deeper understanding but with practical insights on how to spot and challenge the silent mechanisms that could be shaping your digital experience. Tune in for a discourse that promises not just to inform but to transform your engagement with the ever-evolving world of social media.

Learn more at www.removednews.com and www.reveddit.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

One of the best things about having a podcast is it gives others who have something interesting and important to talk about a reason to reach out to me to be on the show, and that was the case with Robert Hawkins. Robert contacted me about being a guest because he wanted to talk about shadow banning, and I was immediately like say more, because I know nothing about this topic, but it sounds pretty intriguing. If you don't know what shadow banning is, trust me when I say that you do want to know what it is, because it impacts all of us. Shadow banning is the act of muting a user or their content on a platform without informing them. Basically, they take your stuff down and they don't let you know about it. You might be able to still see your stuff, but nobody else can see it. Back in December of 2022, the Washington Post published an article that made note of the practice making headlines when Elon Musk released evidence intended to show shadow banning was being used to suppress conservative views. But, like I said, this is a problem that impacts all of us. A survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that nearly one in 10 Americans on social media suspect that they have been shadow banned. Their research found the platforms with the largest percentage of users who believed they had been shadow banned were Facebook, followed by Twitter, then Instagram and then TikTok. According to their report, users most frequently believe that they have been shadow banned for their political views or their positions on social issues and, as a conservative, this totally makes sense to me. As a matter of fact, the survey found that among the users who believe they had been shadow banned, they were disproportionately Republican. The survey also noted that other groups that were disproportionately affected included males, hispanics and those whose gender identity don't match with their biological sex. Who knew that all of these different groups would find something in common? During my conversation with Robert, we explored how shadow banning manipulates your conversations online, how the practice helps bots and hurts humans, how it actually helps to radicalize online communities and, ultimately, how shadow banning is today's real censorship. If you want to know more about this topic and whether it has impacted you, and especially if you care about restoring and maintaining free speech values online, keep listening.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Welcome to the Communication 24-7 Podcast, where we communicate about how we communicate. I'm your host, jennifer Furlong. Hi everybody, this is Jennifer Furlong, host of the Communication 24-7 podcast, where we communicate, about how we communicate. This is a topic, y'all, that I think you're going to want to pay close attention to. If you're anything like me, you're not very familiar with the topic. Maybe you've heard about it, someone talk about it in passing, or maybe you've even read about it in an article or two, but it is a topic that I think impacts everyone, whether you know it or not.

Speaker 1: 3:27

I am so incredibly excited that I have an expert with me today to talk about this topic, and I know I'm building up the curiosity of the audience like what in the heck is she talking about? So let me explain who my guest is, and then we will dive right into this topic. Like I said, pay close attention. This is something that's going to impact everyone. So who do I have with me?

Speaker 1: 3:54

The gentleman I have with me today is named Robert Hawkins, and Robert is a social entrepreneur and founder of Revetit, a website that shows people where they have been shadow banned or censored. So there's the topic shadow banning and, like I said, I don't know a whole lot about it. That's why I needed an expert today. Robert became passionate about restoring free speech values online after discovering his own comments from past years had been secretly removed from past years had been secretly removed. Some of us have probably had a similar experience. So before founding Revetit, robert worked as a data scientist and a web developer. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm excited to have you here. You are going to take us on a very important journey. We got a lot to learn from you. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 4:49

Thank you so much for having me, jen. I'm excited to have this conversation with you. A communications expert.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Before we get into shadow banning and defining what that is and why should we even care about it. Why is this even a topic that warrants an entire episode to focus on it? Can you tell us a little bit more about your journey and what was it that it just kind of triggered something in you and you're like you know what. I need to do something about this.

Speaker 2: 5:17

That's a great opening question, I think. Just going back to well, I was educated in computer science, so I had a bachelor's in computer science and I worked as a programmer in the US for several years and I had a friend who had moved to East Asia and I went to visit him and ultimately ended up in Taiwan where I lived and actually met my wife there, and I lived there for the last 10 years until I moved back recently, but during that time period I was kind of a digital nomad and so I would rely on internet sources for my learning and for social interaction with other programmers and things like that and maybe spending a little bit too much time online commenting about political topics. And several years into this, my wife became pregnant and I needed some stronger work to put on my resume before we came back to the US and I was looking at the Reddit.

Speaker 2: 6:24

Reddit is a website, a social media platform. Your listeners probably have come across it maybe by looking for information about a particular product. It's got huge comment sections that can be up to anywhere from 100 comments to 20,000 comments on a single post, and so I was looking at Reddit data and noticed that in one view, one of my own old comments showed up for me, but in the other view it had been removed. But I knew that when I was logged in that I could still see that comment. So I was shocked to discover the removal and I realized what was going on, which was that all comment removals on that platform are what I would call shadow band or shadow removals.

Speaker 2: 7:15

And so that really shocked me, and I didn't plan for this to be a six-year project. I thought this was going to be a two-week project. I thought, oh, I kind of know how to address this. I can throw up some JavaScript in a web extension or a website and compare these two views and show people where their own comments are getting removed that they don't know about, and then I'll share that on Reddit and other people will share it and they will put it up and everybody will know. And then, problem solved, the platform will be induced to change.

Speaker 2: 7:54

Well, that didn't happen at all. What tended to happen was I would share the site in a particular sub-forum on Reddit and the moderators there would remove it, because that was oversight into their work. Along the way, I just kind of kept thinking oh, just two more weeks. If I just do this, one more thing, if I just make this bot that alerts people when their messages are removed or add this various feature to the site, that that will get me over the hump and more people will know about it. And to some extent that's been true.

Speaker 2: 8:32

The user base has been growing. But I kind of accept now that this element of content moderation, if you can even call it that I mean, that's what it's known as, but I think it's more like radicalizing us when you secretly remove content. But anyway, that it's always going to be out there in some form. But I still do my best to raise awareness of the work that I did and how it can inform other platforms, because it's not just Reddit that does this. In fact, this occurs on all the platforms and actually we all do it to each other. It's not even just the platforms doing it to us, yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:14

So you just stumbled upon it. It would just happenstance. You noticed that hey, wait a minute, this isn't looking right. And I noticed that it's not showing up, my comments aren't showing up, and so that was just kind of like the starting point of this journey that you've had now six years. You've said six years later yeah, from the two weeks, right.

Speaker 2: 9:39

That's, that's right. Yeah, it was completely stumbled upon, not planned on at all, like a blog. You know, just coming up with my little comments about, you know, one among those 20,000.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Yeah, did you contact them first to ask them why, why is my comment being hidden? And did they give you an answer to that?

Speaker 2: 10:25

So I've had to kind of reverse engineer the answer to that question, contacting Reddit about why. Yes, I've had some interactions with some administrators where they'll use the language oh, sometimes it's best to just quietly remove something. But they won't go as far as saying I think there's a difference between just quietly remove, where you're not informing somebody, and actually presenting somebody's comment to them as if it's been unaltered In the same place, like if you load up that same URL with a different user or when you're logged out, it will be gone. So it's really a false representation of your own content. Back to you in the same place, where other users don't see it, they see it as removed. So I've had some interactions with administrators where they use that kind of language and then, indirectly, I've read some former Reddit employees have said well, this is just the obvious solution, that when you have naysayers or trolls or spammers, that the obvious solution is just to misrepresent you know, to shadow ban their content, and I disagree with that very strongly.

Speaker 2: 11:50

We can get into that, but that's, yeah, the answer to your question. I've had some interaction, but you know Reddit is a platform with over 400 million monthly active users, or now I think they report daily active users, so it's something like 70 million. That's a lot, yeah. So you know they don't have the ability to interact with everybody one-on-one and you know I'm not coming to them as a representative of any sort of organization either, so it's not like I have a lot of leverage to get that kind of response from them maybe.

Speaker 1: 12:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:26

Maybe I don't give myself enough credit, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Well, how prevalent of an issue do you think shadow banning is on not just Reddit, but maybe across the different social media platforms, because it's not just Reddit doing it? I mean, like you mentioned content moderation, and maybe that could be something we talk about next. How do we define content moderation versus how do we define shadow banning? But how prevalent do you think this is across the different platforms?

Speaker 2: 12:58

Oh, I think it's exactly as you stated in your opening statement that it impacts all of us. Certainly, if you comment on the internet, I think it's very likely that your comment has been removed without your knowledge before, because I see it happening in all of the subreddits on Reddit. That includes certainly politics, which is a left-leaning group, but also conservative, also pro-life, also atheism, also Christianity, all the gaming forums. There's just not really an exception, because that's how it works across the whole platform. By default, the system shows you everything, all of your removed stuff, as if it's it's not removed right.

Speaker 1: 13:49

So what do you see as the difference between content moderation and shadow banning, or or do you see a difference between those two?

Speaker 2: 14:00

yeah, I do. I think maybe content moderation is a superset, but that's even giving leeway to some of their position, because I don't think that when you withhold information about removing somebody's content, that that's moderation at all. In fact, I think maybe what I would say is there's transparently removing content and then you know, not transparently removing it.

Speaker 1: 14:30

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 14:31

And I generally support transparently removing it. But then, within the not transparently removing it, there's also another division where, so say on Twitter for example, if you just write a tweet, it kind of goes out into other people's feeds, right, but these feeds are no longer, I don't think, sorted by date, they're just kind of based on your preferences and how many other people liked it and things of that nature. So maybe Twitter could remove some of your content from other people's feeds, but you wouldn't have any way to really verify that. That's them manually doing that, or even with an algorithm saying like oh, I don't like the domain that you used, like BitChute or Rumble or something, and so I'm not going to show that to as many people, versus just their algorithm saying, oh, that's not been popular in the past, that kind of content, those keywords, and I'm just automatically not going to show it. In that scenario, and I'm just automatically not going to show it In that scenario, say, twitter removes your content from that kind of preference-based feed and they don't tell you that they removed it, but they're also not showing you back your content in that same feed because you don't have access to that feed.

Speaker 2: 16:04

Those are other people's preference-driven feeds. So in this subset of content moderation there's also like kind of undisclosed or secretly removed and then also shadow removed, where your comment has a parent comment to it and if you load up that parent comment yours is still shown to you, whereas for other people it doesn't appear. So yeah, I do draw a distinction for sure between what they call content moderation and this shadow banning.

Speaker 1: 16:42

And what you said just a few moments ago is so critically important to the conversation. I think it's already way too easy to do with what's going on, you know, with information and how important it is. I'm a huge media literacy advocate and we have a hard enough time, I think, getting people to understand that when you're taking in information from online sources, you have to consider context, you have to consider the sender of the message, you have to consider where did they get that information? You know there are a whole host of questions that have to come along with anything that you're reading online. So now this seems to be just an extra layer that is going to challenge someone who is receiving that information.

Speaker 2: 17:52

It's another layer of preventing them from being able to see the whole picture or to at least understand the entire context that some of these comments are, you know, are sending removed because then they would learn something from that interaction and they might choose to participate in a different group or they, you know, they might come back and say, oh, you're right, I, you know, phrased that poorly, let me, let me try putting it another way. Also gives them a chance to learn the rules. So you get a chance to learn the rules or move to another forum. But again, you know, when that's done, without the author of that removed comments knowledge, they're not going to think to remove, move to another forum and they're not going to learn the rules.

Speaker 1: 18:54

Right, I'm kind of muddied with how I feel about topics like this, especially when we start getting into the area of free speech. And how does this impact? You know what? At what point does the First Amendment actually cover this and at what point does it not cover it? You know, there seems to be a whole lot of information swirling about. People have different ideas of what the First Amendment should cover and what it should not cover, especially when we're talking about the online space, you know, and in social media. What is your take on the connection to our First Amendment rights in what you're seeing in terms of shadow banning and even content moderation? Do you think companies have a right to say look, this is a private company and if we don't like what you have to say, we don't, we don't have to allow you that space to say it, or what? I'm just curious as to what your your opinion is on that.

Speaker 1: 20:02

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Speaker 2: 21:14

I love this question because I've been researching how this has come up in some court cases recently and I've also changed my mind about it.

Speaker 1: 21:23

Yeah, so I go back and forth.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Yeah, I've gone back and forth, literally gone back and forth, because you know, like I said, I when I started this project I thought it would go viral on its own. And then I thought, as I added features, that a story would be written about it on its own. And then when I started to have to write that story myself and like reach out to journalists and and try to connect with them, my my uh knee jerk response I guess I think of it now was, well, the government should fix this, we should write legislation that makes this illegal. And as I dove into that, I started to learn more about the history of free speech. Now, I will admit I'm an egotistical American and I thought being born American made me an expert in this topic. Right, but again, little did I know. And I learned a lot about how really free speech has always been under attack, and even from our representatives who, on both the right and the left, may write laws that run into it or would abridge it if they were permitted. And then, more recently, I've been reading about the net choice cases, which dealt with the legislation coming out of Florida and Texas and without getting too into it. I think there is a question there about whether or not misrepresenting the status of your content to you is legal Even under our existing laws. I don't know exactly where it would fall or how it should be enforced. I recently finished a book, what's called the administrative state, which is concerned about the consolidation of power within the executive branch. So yeah, I would be concerned about handing that off to like an agency to come up with new rules and to enforce it, because that just seems like adding to the administrative state problem.

Speaker 2: 23:30

I mean, I could share my understanding of some free speech case law, like there is a case about a parade in Boston in, I think, the nineties where one group was excluded and the Supreme Court said oh, you're allowed to exclude, it was a LGB group actually. And the court said you're allowed to exclude this group from an Irish Day parade on the basis that the other multifarious voices are the ones that are being represented. And I heard this argument being made as being supportive of shadow banning, in the sense that you as a private entity are permitted to exclude whatever you want. But I don't think that in that case, which is known as Hurley, that the court would have thought to consider well, what if the would-be parade participant didn't know that they were rejected, but in fact they did know, right, they took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, right, and they sent a big message there. And so there, I think there is a difference.

Speaker 2: 24:44

But you know, if somebody were to write legislation that say, bans, shadow banning, as I define it, this misrepresenting of your content, and it went, you know, up through the courts there are probably many other arguments that lawyers on the big tech side would come up with to defend the practice. Big tech side would come up with to defend the practice. I hope that conversation happens. I think it's one that I always wanted to get started. I didn't imagine it having to happen in the legal context. I think of this more of as a cultural issue, where the kind of desire to control is just a weakness that we all have.

Speaker 1: 25:27

Yeah Well, it is absolutely something that I know. Speaking in conservative circles, it absolutely has been a concern and it's been a vocal concern. I'm sure you've read about it and heard about it Conservatives saying that for a while now, conservative voices have been restricted on certain online platforms and while it has, as far as I know and I don't know, with this whole shadow of anything, maybe it has happened to me. I don't know, I haven't really looked for it, but as far as I know, it hasn't happened to me when I've expressed my opinions about certain topics, but I do know it is something that you know has happened to many of my conservative colleagues. You know, on the right there to be an imbalance of voices that are targeted to be censored online and in different platforms, or do you think it's kind of a?

Speaker 2: 26:36

well, it's really hard to make that assessment because you have to make like a quality judgment about you know how important was this comment versus, versus that comment, or you have to make a subjective assessment of whether a given comment was, was left or right. And some people have said well, you should do research on that and and just insert your subjective assessment. I would be happy to do that if somebody paid me to do it.

Speaker 1: 27:03

Right.

Speaker 2: 27:06

But just in my own time. It seems quite challenging, and I don't have the quotes in front of me, but I think there are several free speech luminaries who've said things like you know, any abridging of free speech, even even the you know, censorship of a single comment, ought to be enough to to make your hair stand on end, and I really found that to be true. I have collected or sort of categorized a bunch of removed commentary that I thought might be useful for you know somebody in the media to write a story about this. If they wanted to, say, interview somebody who had been impacted like this, they could kind of research what kind of comments they had made in the past and see if they want to write a story on that. And so, but yeah, I, yeah I there's definitely part of me that feels, yes, there are conservative voices that are being shut down, eaten out, because what this particular content moderation technique allows is for the rabble rousers or, you know, the troublemakers, to get the upper hand.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Because you can just imagine if, if your goal in life is to go online and cause trouble for other people, you're going to be moderated more often maybe, and so you're more likely to discover this secret removal mechanism and then you're more likely to become somebody who takes advantage of it, start your own forum and then does the same thing to other people. So often the platforms and even legislation in Europe will keep an exception for secretly removing spam, and when you and I hear spam, we think of bots like automation, and you know I don't want spam about Viagra or whatever in my inbox and email.

Speaker 2: 29:29

So I accept some filtering out that content, but in email it goes to my spam box so I could go back there and check it once in a while to see if it's there. Like, the sender doesn't know if it's been marked as spam maybe, but I can check it. So there is some fail-safe there. But anyway, yeah, I don't think it's left or right. I think it really eats away at the middle and it empowers. It doesn't help combat spam.

Speaker 2: 29:59

It's helpful to to the spammers to have this secret mechanism that that fools humans, because secrecy does not fool bots. You know, we all know, you have to fill out those annoying captchas sometimes to sign up for an account or visit a web page. That that's the thing that fools bots the secret secretly removing stuff. I can tell you as a software engineer, it takes half a second for a bot to look up a webpage as if it's another user or as if it's logged out, whereas, you know, I've got thousands of comments from people who go a year, five years, a decade, without learning that this is how, um, how much of their content has been removed from Reddit, for example.

Speaker 1: 30:44

Right, you know, I just remembered I lied. I think I have been shadow banned and it happened recently. I was just thinking about this on TikTok and I had been averse to TikTok for ages, but having a show you know having a podcast.

Speaker 1: 31:02

It was like, okay, jen, welcome to TikTok. And I had been averse to TikTok for ages, but having a show, you know, having a podcast, it was like, okay, jen, welcome to 2024. Get out there, you know, put the stuff out there and see what happens. And one of the clips that I posted on TikTok I was interviewing someone who is a fellow cancer survivor and we were having a conversation about how we found out that we had been diagnosed with cancer and I had shared the story of. I found out on the app. You know, when you get your tests done and you have the health app and you get this little ding that you have tests that are results that are in, and I wasn't quite sure of what the language was, because I'm not a medical person and so I called up the office and I was just sharing the story and this one person posted on the on the comments, what she couldn't have. Just Googled it and I will.

Speaker 1: 32:01

I'll admit I was triggered, okay, so maybe this is why I was shadow banned very nice comment so so I responded something about yeah, because we all know it's such a great idea to consult Dr Google about. You know important, you know medical diagnoses you dumbass yeah that's what. And later on they had tagged me and said, oh, haha, you deleted your comment and I was like wait a minute no I didn't and I went back through and it was gone and yeah no, I still stand behind what I said dumbass.

Speaker 1: 32:41

but apparently I'm not allowed to type that on the platform. I don't know and I never bothered to look into it or ask anyone. I just was, like you know, mentally and emotionally tapped at that point. I just don't even want to deal with it. But now, having this conversation with you, I'll be damned. I think that's what happened to me. It must have been. I don't understand. Where could my comment have gone?

Speaker 2: 33:07

Totally. Yeah, they didn't tell you, and what's the harm in telling you anyway? You're a real person. You should be treated like a person, not just a piece of content that the platform wants or doesn't want.

Speaker 1: 33:21

Yeah, exactly. And, like you mentioned earlier, at least if you are upfront about it and say hey, Jen, we took this comment off because we have a rule against calling people dumbasses, you know? Okay, then I'll come up with another that I could use instead of that.

Speaker 1: 33:39

Totally, I completely agree does the First Amendment play in content moderation or even shadow banning, you know, does an organization really have a responsibility, you know, to its users to let them know when things are taken down? Do you think the government should have a role in getting into the private industry you know private organizations and getting into the business of of making those types of decisions? What do you think about that?

Speaker 2: 34:34

At this point I would say mostly no. Yeah. The more I, you know, learn about that kind of option and the potential implications, the more nervous I get about these entities becoming part of another arm of the executive or just part of the government is scary enough and I know that there are, you know, some very smart individuals and law firms who are tackling those questions as they come up in various court cases. There was Gonzalez versus Google last year about whether or not platforms have a right to algorithmically select content, and the courts kind of said, yeah, their algorithms are their freedom to do it. But with the recent Texas and Florida legislation it got a little bit closer. That decision hasn't come down yet but just based on the oral arguments it kind of sounded like maybe not everything from those proposals would be upheld, and one of the big ones of that was that platforms wouldn't be allowed to even transparently remove content in the ways that they have been doing.

Speaker 2: 35:55

So that in my opinion, would be a big shift and I don't support disallowing the platforms from um making their own selections there. But I I share the concerns of um, the people who wrote that legislation, that uh, these platforms do have a lot of influence on society today and you know, it's kind of like they're their own little kingdoms and I just wouldn't want to see us consolidate all of that power into a government. But I don't know if there's like a thread the needle, if there's a way we can thread the needle through, we can thread the needle through I, yeah, so I, you know, I think I would support some legislation banning the misrepresentation of your content. You know, your case is a little bit different where when you went back and looked at it, even though they didn't tell you when you were logged in, you could still see that it was removed, right.

Speaker 1: 37:01

Yes, that's right. Yeah, because when I looked for it after he had mentioned haha, you took down your comment and I was wait a minute I didn't take it down, but somebody took it down yeah but you could see that it was taken down.

Speaker 2: 37:16

so in that case, you know, I would say that's ethically wrong and inadvisable in the long term for the platform because it doesn't build trust among its user base. It's really short-term thinking, but I wouldn't write legislation that restricts them from doing that myself restricts them from doing that myself.

Speaker 1: 37:48

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses for several years now. We've witnessed speakers being shouted down, students and professors say that they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly which I would know because I was one of those professors and rates of anxiety, depression and suicide across our society are rising. How did this happen? If you want to explore serious answers to this important question, I highly recommend you read the Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Hite. In this book, they explore critical changes in childhood, such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised child-directed play and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what's happening on college campuses today, or has children or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines. Get your copy of the Coddling of the American Mind today at communication247.com. Slash podcast that's wwwcommunication247.com. Forward. Slash podcast. Yeah, yeah, I think that's the challenge when we start getting into these types of conversations.

Speaker 1: 39:19

I was listening to a podcast from the dispatch it's. One of their podcasts is called Advisory Opinions and I like listening to it because it's from a legal standpoint and they have lawyers on there that actually talk about the legal side of this topic that we're talking about and they were discussing the First Amendment and how it may or may not apply to exactly what we're talking about. You know, with private organizations and the reason I go back and forth so much, you know I have been for the longest time a free speech absolutist. I'm like you know what you just say, what you got to say. I don't think anybody should take it down. Deal with it. At least we all know what you're thinking, right.

Speaker 1: 40:05

And then I transition just a little bit quasi free speech absolutist, except for when it's obviously fake information. You know, I think that we do a lot of harm with allowing blatantly false information, you know, to proliferate out there. But then when, as I was listening to this podcast the other day, there was a part of it that I had never considered. If the private organization is one that is partially funded with public dollars. That's the key there With the First Amendment.

Speaker 1: 40:46

Clearly, if it's a government organization, government-funded organization, whether it's a nonprofit or a state university, for example, that's why the free speech laws are so much they're adhered to much you know much more strictly rather than a private organization. But if you are a huge organization like Microsoft, for example, and you do receive government grants or some type of government funding, at what point does that now bring you into the public, publicly funded organization realm? And then at that point the rights shift. You know as far as free speech and how free speech is, I guess, quote governed, you know on these different platforms. That was a part of it that I had never thought about before.

Speaker 1: 41:40

And so I find myself shifting once more.

Speaker 2: 41:44

I haven't given it enough consideration myself either. You know, a lot of us just don't know how much money these services are getting for the government. I believe that they are. They do receive some funding for doing work to respond to requests, for, you know, information from security services. How much of their bottom line is that? And you know, I think there's unquestionably entanglement between government and platforms, between government and platforms. You know, we see that coming up in the Murthy versus Missouri case, which is alleging federal government has bridged free speech through their communications with platforms.

Speaker 1: 42:35

And I find that completely compelling.

Speaker 2: 42:36

Yeah, so you know be watching that case and also the House Judiciary Committee's weapon weaponization of the federal government. Yeah, Watching that closely to see what comes out.

Speaker 1: 42:52

Yeah, and to anyone who's wondering well, you know what's the big deal, what's the problem with that? It's kind of like what Robert was saying earlier when you start getting the federal government legislating and getting involved. I don't like to use the word slippery slope, because I know that's a logical fallacy a slippery slope. At the same time, I think there is cause for concern when you do have a branch of government that is influencing that type of power over what is allowed to be said, who is allowed to say it and who are going to be the ones to monitor these things and then make those decisions. At the same time, especially if it's coming from government legislation, it's definitely a concern I think all of us need to continue to pay attention to. I do want to transition. Tell me about your platform. You created Revetit as a response to your experience with the shadow banning. Tell us a little bit more about the platform and what is it that we, as normal everyday users, could expect from the platform? How do we use it?

Speaker 2: 44:02

we, as normal everyday users, could expect from the platform. How do we use it? So on the homepage it's got a little box where you can enter a username. So if you have a Reddit account, you can type in your username and look up all of your secretly removed comments in the past. If you wanted to test this out and see for yourself what I'm talking about, I set up a little group called Can't Say Anything, so you could create a Reddit account in a couple of minutes and go to that group and write a comment and you'll see that after you write it you won't receive any sort of notification. It'll still look to you like it's there, but if you log out and look at it, it won't exist. Another thing that's on the homepage of the site is some testimonials from other users who discover, after years of using the site, that comments they've written in the past have been removed that they didn't know about. I can share a few of those with you if you like.

Speaker 1: 44:57

Yeah, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:59

So one person says One person says Now that is interesting. How can they justify removing comments while making it appear to the user that the comments are still there? Further, no reasons are given at all. Another user writes oh my God, there was a thread where somebody insisted that the police in Europe had not been enforcing COVID restrictions using violence. I posted several videos and news articles showing otherwise. No one ever replied to it.

Speaker 2: 45:30

Now I know why and I list, you know, like 50 of those on the page. But there are a few times where my site has come up in comments or has been allowed to stay live for a few hours and you'll just get thousands of these comments from users who didn't know they're being moderated. Yeah, so I've tried to share it on Reddit. That's been difficult. Another way you can access my content is by going to removednewscom, which is a newsletter where I try to write for an audience who might not be using Reddit. So you know, I try to point out that this secret removal mechanism is different from transparent content moderation. I think a lot of the discussion around content moderation today has been focused on mostly on what content is getting removed.

Speaker 1: 46:21

Right.

Speaker 2: 46:22

And there are folks on the left also who are concerned about that ethnic minorities or other other types of content and really the net impact is that shadow banning lets platforms manipulate the apparent consensus.

Speaker 1: 46:39

Mm, hmm, okay.

Speaker 2: 46:41

Yeah, and you know it also hurts politicians' ability to, I think, accurately understand and inform their constituents. Another thing I write about is that it's not effective against bots who can easily detect it. You know it hurts humans the most and you know I think it's inherently divisive, more likely to hurt good faith. Moderators, mediators sorry, I don't think to check for the secret removals on these platforms that are otherwise trusted. So I've got both the newsletter and the website itself. There's also an extension that you can install to get like a little pop up when something you wrote got removed, but unfortunately it only works for Reddit right now and I'd love to see this kind of tool be built for other services. It is possible for some other ones that have public versions of their sites.

Speaker 1: 47:34

Do you have that plan to build it out?

Speaker 2: 47:37

Less and less, I would say. I've been trying to reach out to rights groups to make a statement about this, and I think they're still on the page that all forms of content moderation is the platform's right to do and that they shouldn't be restricted legally or ethically or have any sort of pushback for this particular aspect of it. And I'm a little bit confused by that, because they do also advocate transparency, but I haven't seen them talk about, uh, shadow banning within comments specifically either the media or or rights groups. Um so, but I'm trying to to connect with them and trying to keep an open mind about possibly building more tooling for this. It has been a long time and you know I I may need to focus um more on you know now that I'm back in the US just getting a full time job so I can support my family, because the donations for doing things like open source software, like this are, you know, can can be difficult to generate.

Speaker 1: 48:51

Yeah, well, I'm hoping someone is going to hear this and they'll be like oh man, we got to like, create some type of funding source to to continue, because I think you're right in that the conversation does tend to focus a lot on what content is being moderated, versus the behind the scenes how is it being moderated and whether or not it is transparent. That's probably the challenge right there, the speed bump, if you will that a lot of people are not understanding that aspect of it. So I think that's why it's really important to continue to have these conversations. Like I said earlier, I had no idea what this was, and now it's getting me thinking about how it can have a profound impact on our communication and our perception and how we understand the topics that we're discussing and how we understand the world around us. It can have a huge impact on that, and the transparency of it is a big question. So I do hope that at some point, either you get some funding or some support to be able to expand that.

Speaker 1: 50:02

One question I do have regarding if someone goes to your website and they do want to use your platform to do some research into whether or not they've been shadow banned on Reddit. Once they find the information that they're looking for, what is it? What's the next step? Like, if they, truly if they agree with you? Look, this is a problem, and I'm not really appreciating the fact that this is being done behind my back and you know at least let me know what in the world is going on. What is the next step to that? What is it that we can do in order to gain some momentum in this movement that you're trying to create?

Speaker 2: 50:48

I would say reach out to your favorite podcast hosts, your favorite columnist or a tech reporter, and ask them to do a story on it. Say, hey, I was shadow banned and I wasn't being a jerk online or maybe I was, but I deserve to know about it so that I can you know, so that I can grow and learn, which? Is you know, I think, a human right.

Speaker 1: 51:17

Right.

Speaker 2: 51:17

So so reach out to people who have, who are good communicators, and encourage them to do a story on it would be my advice.

Speaker 1: 51:27

Okay, that's a fantastic idea. Is there any particular aspect of this topic that you feel is really important to touch on at this point that maybe we have not had an opportunity to talk about just yet?

Speaker 2: 51:40

I would say, just if you do speak up about this practice and you get some pushback, don't just buy what somebody tells you is a good reason for doing it. Don't buy the line that this defeats spam it doesn't. Don't buy the line that it defeats trolls or people with malintent online it doesn't. And if you're not able to convince one person that you know that's okay, don't give up on the topic, because you know we do get sucked into. I think these arguments about what should be allowed to stay online and you know, maybe some of it can be taken down, but at the very least we should know that it's being taken down. One of the problems with disagreeing about or focusing on what is getting removed online is yeah, you're, you're sorry, I just lost my train of thought.

Speaker 1: 52:37

I think we are at the end of the hour. What we know is being removed online. I I think that's that's right.

Speaker 2: 52:43

Challenges yeah, yeah, if that's what we're focusing you, you, you assume that you know that, what, what is being while being removed, but you don't know what you don't know, and I'm not even saying like when I say that I don't know all the stuff that's being removed we don't know what we don't know Probably so many good ideas from people out there, or that would change our way of thinking about the world such that when I go out and interact with you in public, that you know I would already understand that you have that viewpoint.

Speaker 2: 53:12

But I think a lot of times what may be happening when we are just looking at this sort of narrow portal that we imagine is the is all encompassing, like we have access to all the information. Actually it's. It's very filtered and in ways that we don't understand, that's being filtered. So. So when we go out and interact with each other in the real world, we're caught unprepared and it leads to, you know, like shouting matches in schools and or, you know, potentially even worse.

Speaker 1: 53:40

So I think that was very well said. I think that's the key right there to remember for anyone who is still asking that question, that the so what? Question, like you just said, it's being filtered in ways that we don't even know how it's being filtered and that right there, is preventing you from having a full picture, from having a full understanding of a lot of the topics that are being discussed online. For me, that's it, like that's all I need to know, because I want to know. I don't want anybody filtering anything for me. Let me look through it myself and then I'm going to make my decision based on the information that's in front of me. But then I'm going to make my decision on based on the information that's in front of me. But if I can't trust that all the information is in front of me, that's really doing me and everyone else a disservice at the same time.

Speaker 2: 54:29

Yeah, and you deserve that. I mean, you're a person. Everybody deserves to be, to be treated like, like people. Yeah so thanks so much for having me on, Jen. I really appreciate you taking the chance on this topic that you didn't know anything about.

Speaker 1: 54:41

Oh, absolutely. I'm so glad we did. Now I know a little bit more about this topic, so, and and I think this is going to get a lot more people talking about it as well, which is the important thing, all right. So, final thing, how do people get in touch with you?

Speaker 2: 54:55

I think through my newsletter is is a good way. Do people get in touch with you? I think through my newsletter is a good way. Remove newscom. I'm also on Twitter.

Speaker 1: 55:05

You can just use the link from my newsletter or revettacom to find that All right, sounds good, and I'll make sure that the link to your websites are in the show notes as well.

Speaker 2: 55:13

Great, All right.

Speaker 1: 55:14

Robert, thank you so much again, and everyone who is listening. I hope this is some good food for thought. Mull things over, let it marinate for a while, check out Robert's websites and then, yeah, give me a call, contact me and let me know how it goes. I want to know if you were shadow banned. All right, so let's keep the conversation going. If you were shadow banned, let me know. I'll let Robert know and then, you know, maybe we can finally get a columnist to actually write about this stuff. Who knows, keep hope alive. All right, everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and a review.