We’ve Been Shadowbanned — Have You?

Hey all you censored cyberheads,

Last year, midway through our campaign leading up to Occupy’s 10th, I had a sudden moment of panic.

All was well. The campaign was gearing up for the big bang. Folks were clearly fired up.

Then, out of nowhere, the number of people seeing our posts dropped — by half. Immediately, I fired off a couple of frantic messages to others with eyes on our stuff. “Are you seeing this?” “What the fuck is going on?"

I looked at the stats. But I couldn’t pin it down to any one post. Things go up and down all the time, I told myself. Different numbers of people see different things on different days. It’s nothing new. It’s normal. But over the course of two days, our average audience drops in half — and there’s no way to know how or why? That, I realized, just ain’t normal.

Talk about it, though, and you sound crazy. “Are you sure it isn’t just the quality that’s slipping?”

We knew we weren’t crazy. We did our best to promote our posts with sub-tweets, and re-tweets, and more tweets. We fought tooth and nail for what used to be effortless. But it all amounted to a hill of beans.  

It felt like this monolithic media company was toying with us. Did the algorithm change? Or did we?

But in retrospect, it’s clear what happened. We didn’t change. The algorithm didn’t change.

We were shadowbanned.

The platforms say they don’t shadowban. But the Big Tech companies also say they don’t listen to our conversations. We all know how honest they truly are.

We know we're not the only ones. Yet most of us don’t raise a stink. We just stay silent.

Well, we’re done with keeping quiet. And we have a hunch we’re not alone. Comrades, they can’t keep us quiet any longer! Have youbeen shadowbanned? Tell us about it!

Send us your stories — and until we’re heard and acknowledged, we’ll shout ’em loud in the face of the techno-crooks.

For the Wild,

‍The Third Force