I lurked Reddit for a long time before creating an account which is now over 6 years old. I was a ‘Top Contributor’ and in the rewards program. 89k karma, never promoted violence or targeted any group, but I got a 7-day ban which was followed up hours later with a permanent ban. This is because of a comment criticizing Senator Radcliffe, trump, and Musk. The comment included profanity, (I called them hypocrites and cunts), but it wasn’t directed at any user or marginalized group. Just harsh political commentary.
Reddit initially issued a 7-day ban, which I appealed. That appeal was approved, the comment was restored, and they admitted it didn’t violate the rules. But the permanent ban still stands, and my follow-up appeals on that have been ignored. No explanation. No transparency. Just gone.
It’s made me realize how fragile “free speech” is on platforms like Reddit. You can insult regular users and get away with it, say horrendously racist, misogynistic, and homophobic things, but speak too plainly about powerful people and suddenly you’re promoting “hate.”
I combed through the Reddit rules, and nothing I have ever commented or posted violates them.
That’s the reason I’m here on Lemmy now. I’m trying to read more, scroll less, and engage with platforms that aren’t actively censoring political dissent. Who else is in the same boat? Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech? This is my first Lemmy post. I marked it NSFW because of the profanity.
It’s funny how we used to have this trope of the mighty censorship bureau that has to rubberstamp everything (like they do for movies) but the reality is that the sycophants will trip over themselves to censor their neighbors in order to please those above. In Reddits case you have subreddit mods banning and censoring to please the reddit mods, who are trying to please reddit management, who are trying to please people like Musk, who are trying to please Trump. Trump doesn’t have to say anything, those low level Mods are doing all the censoring for him pro bono.
mainly musk was complaining, and he was getting people banned. everytime the gop or musk complained the reddit initiate one of thier famous purges. now they are including vague responses in a ban message so it reduces thier liability, and gives them plausable excuses to ban people.
Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech?
Many people on social media platforms don’t realize the spam filters can be abused by attackers to prevent certain topics from being mentioned. And on front-page subreddits they do not publish comments, they look published if you are logged in, but if you check from off-axis they are unpublished. I’ve been posting some of them here and on Bluesky, but nobody cares (on Bluesky, but people have here) [email protected] maybe some tech press will cover it.
Lifetime (of the person) bans on Reddit for individual subreddits and accounts are dumb. That sites been around for decades. I can only image how many people got banned there at age 16 and are completely different people at age 22. I never see people bring this kind of criticism up.
from what ive heard, subreddit bans are usually 1 year, but it can be lifetime in some circumstances, now it can be anything can be lifetime. its pretty clear they are randomly doing it as well. reddit will look very empty if they get rid of all thier trolls and bots.
Got banned for antisemitism around the time the genocide ramped up in Gaza.
And I was just criticising Israel. Things got a bit heated for the other guy apparently, and then I got brigaded and reported. I didn’t defend Hamas or advocate violence, just criticised Israel.
i was banned from worldnews in '23 for seven days, i partially abandoned that account and went with an OLD one, which usually is more trusted. up until this year, where they decided a temp ban= we will check all the other accounts you made that participated in banned subs, and ban you for that, you this is pretty ridiculous. i think someone also mentioned your account is easily linked with a strangers if any of them get banned you get a indiscriminate ban too.
this time they said i reported too many times tech sub, something about trump so i recieved a 7day ban, then all my accounts were instantly banned, depesite the accts never going into those subs(until like 1-1years later). so they were routing out old accounts you havnt used in years. but thier bannings always increase when a GOP is in power, it was like severe version in 2017-19, now that trump is in power spez is somewhat afraid he will ge the wrath of MUSK.
He probably wasn’t being authentic and was a cyber soldier meant to clean up/destroy Reddit for the AI integration
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2766
And Reddit has been implicated in shady stuff for a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_user_maxwellhill/
deleted by creator
I got shadowbannned after posting about politics.
I never called for or celebrated violence, didn’t upvote pictures of Luigi (which they have a STRANGE hard-on for) or any of that. I just posted neutrally-worded opinions.
Shadowbanning is an abusive behavior and Reddit has been about that for well over a decade. On Twitter, you do something they don’t like, they just tell you, “you have to delete this tweet and wait 12 hours” or whatever. On Reddit, your account just gets “weird” with strange error messages. You have to go digging for information on the phenomenon because they don’t display a message or send an email about it.
The cute little aliens are there to paper over the fact that Reddit’s leadership has no concept of user advocacy. You’re just rows in a few tables to them. You’re the product that’s being sold, and as far as they’re concerned that gives you the same rights as any other product on a shelf.
They are still sending me emails with cute little aliens in them, even though my account is hosed. This is how disjointed they are.
Someone else wrote that on Reddit, the users and admins hate each other. I think that’s true.
uusually they shadowban people for being repeat ban evaders, now they are doing it for any reason. thier filters also caught innocent in the crosshairs too.
I doubt that because I’m shadow banned too with just one account. You can look on the shadow ban page (only page shadow banned people can post on) dozens of people get shadow banned every day. I had never been banned before.
I had never been banned before.
I really liked Reddit, getting a lot of value out of the content posted there by people. And I met some cool people through it.
I never got banned from it myself, but as time went on it was very clear that the company in charge of the platform was not steering things in a good direction, and was not responsible for the value I liked. They just captured the value by being the place where people posted. They really drove that point home when they locked off the API, and I completely quit Reddit at that point, migrating to Lemmy instead.
I definitely feel that Lemmy doesn’t have as much value collected on it yet compared to Reddit. There’s just not as many people posting and generating that value. But, it is free of that sort of draconian control that Reddit has. Not just temporarily free, as a favor from venture capital to draw people in. Permanently free. So, if we build up the value of Lemmy by having more people post here, we will be able to enjoy that value free from the corpo BS.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. :P
I noticed a big difference after they cut off the API. I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days, but I feel the same way about the amount of content. Hopefully more and more people will migrate here as reddit continues their nonsense. It’s a shame to see what it has become.
I’d guess a good bit of us used to almost entirely browse reddit through a third party app (me with Sync) and for various reasons didn’t capitulate, been on Lemmy since and have vastly increased my time with Linux as a result xD
Been on Lemmy from Reddit for over a year. Really don’t miss it, except for a few niche communities.
I’ve been here since the third party app culling and it’s been steadily growing I think from my anecdotal feels when using it. It definitely has a long way to go to replace what reddit was, but hopefully it just keeps growing bit by bit. I see posts like yours frequently these days so you’re definitely not the only one leaving.
I think you’ll just want Substack and/or BlueSky then. Most long form content has moved to Substack.
I suggested that the most appropriate way to deal with Nazis moving into your neighborhood was the traditional Scandinavian practice of hús-brenna. Apparently the admins dislike effective solutions.
It took me a few days to overwrite all of my comments from the prior 15 years or so, but I did it. Because fuck 'em, they don’t get to train their AI on my data.
To be fair, what sounded like some northern European idea of just ignoring the person so much they have to leave did, on researching, lead to the Wikipedia article titled “Arson in Medieval Scandinavia” and was about burning people alive in their own homes.
Reddit still sucks and all and I wouldn’t be at all sad if this happened to quite a few of these fuckwads but I mean c’mon they definitely weren’t mad at the effectiveness of the solution.
They seemed to be upset that I was advocating for an effective and permanent solution. :)
I regret nothing.
they will probably ban talks of inglorius bastard, or Xmen first class someday.
they are mad, now that nazis is control of the government, a NAZI complained to reddit and told spez to increase his “moderation”.
basically like a niche sub i was visiting where the youtube channel owners were asian and jokes about news, and when they turned magat-ty they couldnt take any criticism at all and even started to systematically attack the sub, trying to get it banned, they fled to FACEBOOK of course to orchestrate thier attack, they were concerned the sub was revealing too much about thier shitty behaviour it was driving down thier viewership, they attacked instead of addressing they were the sole cause of thier decline.
the fact they are ASIAN/POC and literally sucking trump and musk off is some mental gymnastics, also contains hallmarks of conservatives, talks of pedophelia, cyrptoscams,etc.
Conservatives that aren’t rich, white, and straight surprise the hell out of me. Like, it was literally founded to push only that group and at the time even Irish people weren’t the right kind of white.
the mental gymnasitics from lgbtq+ is probablly even more shocking. your a gay porn stars and a trumper. im guessing because they believe they are white, they are exception to the rule. besides the one that was reported in media recently(trumps first term) other white ones were criticized, like how come you never slept with POC guys, and only white guys with big PPs in pornos. back when abercombrie stores were around the staff were all white, typical blond males, when any poc entered the store they gave a nasty stare.
they believe if they are warmonger, evangelical enough it counts. i have a feel asians are probably on the lowest totem pole of a token, because they almost never are confrontational in public.
I’m sure they kept copies of the data to train their AI on.
Possibly. They’re not supposed to by their own claims, but possibly. I suppose that if I lived in the EU, I could sue them over it.
No way. I do that all the time, so does most people on Reddit. What is up with peeps on Lemmy always trying to say Reddit is banning shit. I will mention Luigi all the time on Reddit and have never been warned.
they recently backtacked on that recently, and yes they are banning randomly and in much more frequency than normal.
“Edolf” lol. My pet name for Trump is Liddle Shitler.
I just got tired of everything being an OCD argument, including once getting yelled at for saying it was a nice day.
Consider yourself lucky to be off that fascist bootlicking platform
i have been hearing people were being banned again, soon after thier bans ar elifted. it must be thier AI re-banning and not resetting thier filters.
I got banned in 2019 for hate speech against cops.
They’re most vulnerable and marginalized community. How dare you refuse to kiss their boots.
fun fact, former cops and current ones own a handful of subs, most people suspect its:> legadvice, justiceserved, publicfreakout, and many video related subs. right wingers have partially/fully hijacked the main political subs.
I got banned for repeatly saying ashli babbit deserved a bullet. Got classified as promoting violence
Well, that is pretty direct.
FWIW, you’re right, she did.
Her estate should have been sued to recoup costs for the bullet and the officer’s medical expenses.
Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech?
The best thing you can do to hold reddit to account would be to become an active lemmy user. You could make a reddit sucks sublemmy and moderate that if you are angry enough to take action.
I love this idea. I think I’m going to do that.
