c/digital-free-speech-watch

The 2018 EU copyright vote thread I lost sleep over

Back in 2018, I spent a solid 9 hours trying to explain Article 13 to my cousin in Ohio via Facebook comments. Every reply got flagged as spam by their filter, and I kept getting a 24 hour error message each time I tried to repost. Finally gave up and screenshotted everything into a shared Google Doc, which somehow felt more fitting anyway. Has anyone else had platform filters block a simple political explainer for no real reason?

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the_beth•3d ago

I visited a public library in Austin and found their internet filter blocking more than expected

Last Tuesday I stopped by the downtown Austin library to print some forms for my daughter's school registration. But when I tried to open a legal aid website that offers tenant rights information, the library's filter blocked it as 'reference materials.' That struck me as odd since the library is supposed to be a free information space. I asked the librarian about it and she said they use a state-required filter that flags certain keywords, even on non-pornographic sites. Turns out this filter also blocked a local union's event page and a voter registration FAQ. What's the point of a public library if its internet can't serve basic civic information? Has anyone else run into this kind of over-blocking at their local library system?

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the_ben•3d ago

Hit 50 takedown notices tracked and the pattern is wild

Ngl, I started tallying platform removal requests just for my own records back in March. Fifty notices in, and 42 came from the same three countries with almost identical legal phrasing. Has anyone else noticed this kind of boilerplate coming from specific regions or am I reading too much into it?

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elliot_miller22•4d ago

TIL shadowbanning hit my small forum post harder than any outright deletion

I run a local gardening group and posted a link to a city council meeting about pesticide rules. The post stayed up but vanished from the feed for 3 days, zero views except my own. Mods said it was an 'algorithm glitch', but I checked with two other admins and they saw the same pattern. Has anyone else had engagement tank without a clear removal reason, and did you find a way to prove it was deliberate?

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the_beth•5d ago

Update: my old blog posts disappeared from Google after 2 weeks

Last month I noticed my travel blog from 2019 got zero traffic. Then I checked and all 14 posts from a trip to Lisbon were gone from search results. Turns out the hosting platform quietly removed them over a copyright complaint I never saw. Has anyone else had older content vanish without a clear explanation from the platform?

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alices16•11d ago

My $75 mic got me banned from a streaming site, warning to others

I spent $75 on a proper mic for my YouTube channel about open source censorship tools. Two streams in, the platform flagged my audio for 'copyrighted music' because my keyboard clicks were too clean. Lost the channel and the $75. I was just typing about a blocked site, no music at all. Has anyone else gotten dinged for random background noise on these platforms?

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taylor_fox•11d ago

A lawyer told me to stop fighting the takedown notice, I ignored her and won

Last month my blog post about a local protest in Portland got pulled by the platform citing 'misinformation' but they never showed me which line was wrong. My lawyer, Sarah Chen, said fighting it was pointless because the system has no real appeal path, but I sent in a formal challenge anyway with 14 screenshots of my sources. They reinstated it in 6 days and even apologized. Has anyone else had luck pushing back when the automated process seems stacked against you?

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hunt.leo•14d ago

Platform X hides my post but lets hate speech slide, anyone else see this gap?

I had a 200 word post about a local election in Portland flagged for 'misinformation' in 2 hours, but a thread calling for doxxing a journalist stayed up for 3 days. Isn't the enforcement just as bad as the silence, or am I missing something about their guidelines?

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margaretrivera•15d ago

Got shadowbanned on X for reposting a UN report, what's the line now?

Last Tuesday I shared a direct link to a UN report about internet shutdowns in Myanmar, no commentary, just the URL. Within 4 hours my account was shadowbanned, my replies stopped showing up in search, and my engagement tanked from like 200 impressions to 3. I appealed twice and got the same canned response about 'spam behavior', which is obviously not what happened. This is the third time in 6 months I've been hit for sharing official documents, while actual hate speech accounts stay up. So here's my question for everyone: is automated moderation just broken, or is this a deliberate policy to chill reporting on sensitive topics? Has anyone else had a similar experience with reposting UN or human rights reports, and did you ever get a real answer out of support?

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alices16•16d ago

Tried posting a leaked government doc, got flagged in 3 minutes flat

I dropped a PDF link from a whistleblower site into a public Facebook group about city zoning, and the auto-mod nuked it before I even hit refresh. The kicker? The doc was already posted by a local news station in Toledo, Ohio, so it was public info. The group admin told me the filter caught it because of the word 'classified' in the filename, which is wild since the content was just parking lot contracts. Has anyone else had a system flag something that was totally legal just because of a keyword? I still don't get how they pick what's worth blocking.

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nathan545•17d ago

The local mod who told me to 'just post it anyway' was actually right

Back in March I had a video of a protest in Portland that got flagged for 'misinformation' even though it was just raw footage, no commentary. A mod from a smaller subreddit DMed me and said to repost it on a less moderated site instead of fighting the appeal, and I thought that was cowardly at first. I spent two weeks going back and forth with the platform's support team, got three different canned responses, and the video stayed down the whole time. Eventually I took their advice, put it on a little-known video host, and it got about 4,000 views in a week from people who actually cared. The original platform never reversed the flag, so the mod's shortcut was the only thing that worked. It makes me wonder if we're wasting energy trying to win appeals that are rigged from the start. Has anyone else found that just moving platforms beats fighting the system every time?

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ryan_nelson•17d ago

Got a DMCA takedown for a video that didn't even exist

Was scrolling through my YouTube analytics last Tuesday in Austin and saw a copyright strike on a video I never uploaded. The claim said it was a 14 minute clip from a documentary, but my channel only has 3 how-to videos about skateboard wheel repairs. I filed a counter notice with screenshots of my upload history and the strike got removed in about 6 days. Has anyone else dealt with bogus takedowns from bots or trolls who clearly didn't check the channel first?

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miam11•19d ago

Found out I was reporting posts wrong on Twitter for months

I kept hitting the report button for spam on obvious hate speech because I thought that was the closest category. Then a mod from another platform explained that Twitter actually tracks hate speech reports separately and I had been messing up their data the whole time. How do you guys figure out the right reporting categories on different sites?

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ryang65•19d ago

Chat with a librarian in Portland changed how I see platform shadowbanning

I was at the Multnomah County library last Thursday just browsing and got talking to one of the reference librarians. She mentioned she's been tracking how certain political hashtags don't show up in search results on X and Instagram anymore - not the official banned ones, just ones that criticize big tech. She showed me her spreadsheet with 20+ examples from the last 3 months. Honestly it hit different because she's not even mad about it, just calmly documenting everything like it's a normal thing to watch speech get quietly filtered. Kinda made me wonder how much we miss that just flies under the radar. Anyone else notice hashtags or keywords just stop working even though they're not on any policy list?

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the_mary•24d ago

Why does nobody talk about how much YouTube's algorithm just pushes whatever gets the most complaints these days

I watched two debates about the same city council zoning change on different channels last week and the version with 4x the views had clearly cut out the speaker's main point to make them look bad, which just feels like a quiet way to kill the real argument without calling it censorship.

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emma768•25d ago

Spent 5 months fighting a YouTube takedown for a climate protest video

I uploaded a video of a peaceful climate protest from last September, just raw footage of people holding signs and chanting. YouTube flagged it for 'harassment and bullying' within 2 hours. My appeal got denied automatically, no human ever looked at it. I had to go through a whole process with a legal aid group just to get a second review. That took 5 months from the first upload to finally getting the video reinstated last week. Has anyone else had a legit protest video get hit with the harassment flag?

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phoenix_campbell88•25d ago

Why does nobody talk about how platform ToS updates are basically shadow censorship?

I keep seeing people get upset about obvious content takedowns, but the real issue is when sites quietly change their rules. Noticed this on a smaller forum I'm on where they added a line about 'community harmony' to the terms. Now they delete posts that are critical but not technically breaking any rule. It's happening everywhere, not just big social media. Has anyone else caught a site doing this and actually got them to roll it back?

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joseph_coleman•26d ago

Got a 30 day ban from a podcast forum for quoting a public domain book

I quoted a passage from an 1893 book about labor rights to push back on some guy arguing unions are obsolete. The mods said I was spreading "hateful ideology" and gave me a month off. The quote was literally in the public domain for over a century. Has anyone else run into moderation that seemed to target specific viewpoints rather than actual rule breaking?

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the_max•27d ago

Last Wednesday was the worst day for free speech I've seen on Twitter in years

Three separate accounts I follow got suspended within 4 hours for posting screenshots of local city council meetings calling out corruption, and one of them had 15k followers with no prior strikes - has anyone else noticed a sudden spike in removals this month?

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anna758•27d ago

Conversation with my neighbor made me question if reporting spam is actually surveillance

My older neighbor Ron told me last week that every time I report a Facebook post for hate speech, I'm just helping them build a bigger profile on everyone, and now I can't stop thinking about that while scrolling.

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barbara278•28d ago

Why does nobody talk about how long it takes to fact-check a single viral claim?

Last week I spent three full evenings trying to verify a screenshot going around about a local politician silencing critics on Facebook. Turned out the original post had been edited twice and the screenshot was from 2018, not last month. Has anyone else run into posts that take way more digging than they should just to figure out if they're actually about censorship or just old drama?

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brookerobinson•1mo ago

Deplatforming a local activist backfired hard in my town last month

I used to think banning bad actors was the only move, but after seeing our city councilman get suspended from Twitter then rally triple the usual support at the next meeting, I flipped completely and now question every shadowban I hear about.

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johnthompson•1mo ago

Yesterday was the worst day for free speech on YouTube I've seen in months

I moderate a small political commentary channel and yesterday YouTube pulled down 7 videos in 3 hours, none of which broke any rules I could find. Two were just someone reading a news article with their own opinion attached, zero hate speech or harassment. Anyone else seeing a sudden spike in automated takedowns this week?

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the_cameron•1mo ago

Spent a week tracking deleted Reddit threads and found a pattern

Last Tuesday I started screenshotting every political post that vanished from a few subs I follow. By Friday I had 47 examples where the removal reasons didn't match the actual content. One mod told me in a DM that they got pressure from higher ups to take down anything even slightly critical of a specific company. Has anyone else tried documenting this kind of stuff before it gets scrubbed?

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spencer_moore39•1mo ago

Can we talk about that $50 'censorship proof' VPN I tried last month?

I bought this VPN called FreedomFlare for 50 bucks after seeing ads in this group, but it kept popping up warnings every time I tried to visit a site they didn't like. Turns out their 'free speech' filter was just blocking stuff their investors opposed, total bait and switch. Has anyone else here fallen for a service that promised openness but just added new walls?

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