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Musings Report 2023-20 5-13-23 How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?
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How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?
While I'm certainly prone to carpenter-type outbursts when suffering frustrating setbacks in real-world situations, my online presence is (other than the occasional rant) fairly restrained, sticking to the journalistic script I learned as a free-lancer for newspapers: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream / institutional sources and raise the questions / build the thesis on those links / data.
I avoid conspiracy-related topics (not my interest, not my expertise) and hot-button ideological / political cleavages (us vs. them is also not my interest). My go-to source for charts and data is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS, etc.
Given my adherence to journalistic standards, I wonder: how did someone like me get shadow-banned by Big Tech and other entities?
The standard cause (or excuse) for being banned or shadow-banned is "distributing misinformation." This charge is rarely backed up with specifics; the notice is something you posted "violates our community standards," or equivalent broad-brush language.
Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you're not even notified that your visibility to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.
What are the precise standards for declaring a link or statement as "misinformation?" As the twitter files revealed, what qualifies as "misinformation" is constantly shifting as a sprawling ecosystem of censors share information and blacklists. This report is well worth reading:
The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know.
Not only do we not know what qualifies as "misinformation," we also don't know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their response is to whatever's been flagged. My colleague Nate Hagens, who is equally scrupulous about using authoritative sources, posted this comment last year:
"It's both funny and scary. It was explained to me today that the new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w evidence of visiting non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you frequent eg Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms categorizes your FB content (even if it's a chicken soup recipe) as 'non-mainstream'.
Big brother is watching (and not even thinking).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equal footing- and the status quo (material growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current path, without a map or plan."
The systems that shadow-ban us are completely opaque. Who's to say that a knowledgeable human reviews who's been banned or shadow-banned? Given the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Search Engines, is that even possible?
It's well known that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to game, i.e. manipulate to advance one's visibility.
It's also known that simply posting a link to a site flagged as "misinformation" is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unknown ways with unknown consequences.
What I do know is that Of Two Minds was publicly identified as "Russian Propaganda" by a bogus organization with no supporting data, PropOrNot in 2016. This front's blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less giving it the authority of a major MSM outlet.
One might ask how a respected, trusted newspaper could publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were identified as "Russian Propaganda." Standard journalism requires listing sources, not just blacklists. Clearly, the Washington Post should have, at a minimum, demanded a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were labeled as "Russian Propaganda" so the Post journalists could check for themselves. At a mimimum, the Post should have includes several links as examples of "Russian Propaganda" for each site on the list. They did neither, a catastrohpic failure of the most fundamental journalistis standards. Yet no one in the media other than those wrongfully blacklisted even noted the abject failure.
In effect, the real propaganda was on the front page of the Washington Post: an unsourced, un-investigated blacklist.
How did I get on a list of "Russian Propaganda" when I never wrote about Russia or anything related to Russia?
There are two plausible possibilities. One is "guilt by association." I've been interviewed by Max Keiser since 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to say, these sources were flagged, as was anyone associated with them. So perhaps merely having a link to an interrview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned.
Alternatively, I posted a photo and a story link about Hillary Clinton stumbling rather awkwardly while approaching her car. These sudden stumbles which required being caught by bodyguards were if not numerous, certainly not rare in 2016, and they raised questions about Clinton's health that were left unaddressed other than with the usual gloss-over ("she's fine.").
It could be that questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.
Once on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the "crime"--a shadowy "crime" without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.
Shadow-banning manifests in a number of ways. Readers reported that they couldn't re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader said the Department of Commerce wouldn't load a page from my site, declaring it "dangerous," perhaps with the implication that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms--laughably impossible because there is nothing active or interactive on my sites and thus no potential source for viruses: there are only passive pages and adverts served by Investing Channel.
Users of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have probably noticed that your feed is populated by the same "friends" or "folks you follow." In other words, the feed you're presented with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts / tweets / search results according to parameters that are invisible to users and regulators.
It's easy to drop flagged accounts into Digital Siberia, which is what happened to me.
It's basically impossible to chart the extent of the shadow-banning, or who's doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire ecosystem of censorship is invisible.
By way of contrast, consider the completely false claims being made 40 years ago by some researchers that HIV was not caused by a virus. Those making these erroneous claims were adamant and persistent, even as the scientific evidence that HIV was caused by a virus piled up. Despite the obvious potential for harm--leading those infected by HIV virus to seek treatment for fictious causes--no one demanded the proponents of these false claims be banned as "disinformation."
Interestingly, Flat Earth sites are not banned as disinformation, despite their false claims.
In today's zeitgeist, merely mentioning the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab resulted in an instant ban in 2020. The origin of COVID-19 remains murky, but how could the possibility that it escaped from a nearby lab be labeled as "disinformation" when the facts were not known?
The answer is of course that the lab-escape theory was "politically sensitive" and therefore verboten.
You see the problem: what's deemed "politically sensitive" changes with the wind, and so the boundaries of what qualifies as "misinformation" have no visible or definable edge. Virtually anything consequential can suddenly become "politically sensitive" and then declared "misinformation." When the guidelines of what's a "crime" and the processes of "conviction" are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being "convicted" of a shadow-"crime," we've truly entered a Kafkaesque world.
How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no way to know, and that's a problem for our society and our ability to solve the interconnected problems of the polycrisis the world now faces.
I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Perhaps that's not that far from reality.
Highlights of the Blog
Our Two Deep States, One Public, One Private 5/12/23
Doom Loops Are Multiplying 5/10/23
Once Trust Has Been Lost, There's No Going Back 5/8/23
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Harvested 8 pounds of heirloom tomatoes and made tomato soup to enjoy and share. First grow the tomatoes, then harvest and wash them, then cut out the tough stem and quarter, add two onions and two heads of garlic, bake at 375 degree F for 1+ hour, simmer with 4 cups of broth, add fresh basil and blenderize. Done, bon appetit!
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
I bought a $775,000 Palm Springs house to rent on Airbnb when I was 25. It's not as profitable as I thought it would be. -- AirBnB apocalypse on the horizon....
China rolls out plan to boost trade amid weakening global demand -- trying to repeat the past decade won't work, the world has changed....
'Godfather of Deep Learning' quits Google and warns of AI dangers: 'I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it'
43% of physicians regret their career choice: AMA -- do we need any more evidence that the system is broken?
In The Grip of Necrocapitalism: "The big problem with the Thing is that it is by definition self-destructive." -- this will get you shadow-banned....
Greed, eugenics and giant gambles: author Malcolm Harris on the deadly toll of Silicon Valley capitalism
High concentrations of floating neustonic life in the plastic-rich North Pacific Garbage Patch
China Will Be The Next Japan -- demographics is destiny, etc....
Why Japan Is Rapidly Heading for Extinction: Twitter hashtags reveal the outcry of mothers ignored by the Japanese government
If Something Cannot Go On Forever, It Will Stop
State Department: China Travel Advisory -- this is important. China is now a full-blown completely opaque police state where anyone can be detained and denied access to the US consulate.
"You can let the wind blow you, or you can create your own weather." Gary Dillabough
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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