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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content.

I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.

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I think to a lot of people who pay attention to this sort of thing (eg the crowd already familiar with tools like reveddit) might not be a shock but it is a rare case of it being admitted in clear terms with specific examples which correspond to the sorts of claims that are often dismissed as rumors by third parties. While not anywhere near as high profile, it's kind of like how anyone who was paying attention probably had a decent idea of the kind of surveillance governments might be engaging in, but it was still a big deal when Snowden released the documents making it undeniable.

As the thread says, Twitter used a bit of trickery by calling it "visibility filtering" so they could lean on the technicality that "we do not shadow ban", because they too preferred to leave in some plausible deniability.

It's a shock to most people [1]:

> ...what is the supposed rationale for making you think a removed post is still live and visible?

> ...So the mods delete comments, but have them still visible to the writer. How sinister.

> ...what’s stunning is you get no notification and to you the comment still looks up. Which means mods can set whatever narrative they want without answering to anyone.

> ...Wow. Can they remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed?

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#react

Every person I introduce to reveddit has the exact same reaction. Shock and righteous indignation.

Shadowbanning only works because it is news to people. That's the whole point. People aware of shadowbanning can easily check their posts from a private browser window or similar to see if they exist.

If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!

The existence of shadowbanning, much less fine-grained moderator manipulation,'secret blacklists' or opaque moderator actions shouldn't be news to people, certainly not here. Much of the outrage around this, like much of the outrage in the 2000+ comment dumpster fire that is the previous and still ongoing "Twitter Files" thread, is manufactured for political purposes.

Like yes, social media platforms can moderate content and decide how it appears, or doesn't appear, under whatever arbitrary criteria they want, and they don't need your approval first. That isn't news at eleven, I guarantee it was spelled out in the terms of service no one ever bothered to read.

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