chapotraphouse

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.