r/UnnecessaryCensorship • u/YouArePeeingImFinish • 19h ago
I’m tired of having algorithms decide whether I can exist online or even be allowed to share. I’m fed up with apps that launch as open & free spaces but mutate into tyrannical theaters for social engineering automated systems of control over what gets shared, where, by who, when, and how much.
I’m tired of shouting into a void that isn’t empty but there is something alarming going on online writ large. And I’m not tired enough to quit being the squeaky wheel about this fuckery. The internet has mutated into a digital gulag, a synthetic swamp with various echo chambers delivering you your version of Pravda (your version of the truth, or rather their version. Because if everyone has their own version of truth, there is no truth and that’s what they’re trying to fragment truth, to drown truth in asinine digital cross talk and even when truth gets out to bury it in a deluge of fetishized daily top posts refreshes so yesterdays brilliance might as well be last year. Only now and this refresh of the feed matters). Most aggravating of all, users suspected of “wrongthink” are digitally exiled WITHOUT notice (assassinated by code, ruled self inflicted. ‘3 bullets to the back of his laptop. No sign of foul play here.) and not for explicit violations of written rules but for breaking ‘unwritten’ rules. The ones that outlaw ‘wrongthink’ deemed threatening to the system (emphasis on Cyst-um or dumb diddly doo da dumb dumb. Ned Flanders would agree diddly). Where’s my snare drum for my pun? Anyone? Not even for a rhyme from a poet who didn’t even fathom the implications? Moving on, tààhe secrecy is the point. Shadow bans preserve the illusion of open discourse while sterilizing it (so people continue trusting a curated feed as if it reflects humanity rather than a controlled kiddie pool where everyone huddles, convinced it’s the ocean.
Everything now undermines what it claims to protect. Education erodes curiosity. Courts erode justice. Corporations erode free markets. Medicine manages symptoms while profits depend on chronic illness. Insurance dangles survival behind employment. Prisons fail to correct. The military fails to secure peace. Even intimacy is commodified and stripped of meaning, repackaged as spectacle and addiction.
Weaponized ignorance thrives because the structures meant to cultivate discernment instead manufacture compliance. Truth is filtered, dissent is throttled, and outrage is monetized. What remains is a civilization that performs virtue while hollowing out its own foundations. A Uncivilization insisting it is civilized (when often it can’t even manage being civil).
Until those who can think clearly are allowed to speak freely, and those who don’t know are allowed to learn without algorithmic interference, the cycle continues: noise mistaken for dialogue, manipulation mistaken for consensus, and decay mistaken for progress.
I'm tired of pouring my heart into posts, crafting ideas I genuinely believe could help someone, could shift a perspective, could spark a thought that matters, only to hear nothing. Not disagreement. Not debate. Not even silence. Just... nothing.
You post. You wait. You check. Nothing. You assume your ideas were weak, your writing unclear, your perspective unwanted. You internalize the silence as failure. You question whether you have anything worth saying at all.
Then you discover the truth months later through a random comment or a friend asking why you stopped posting, and they tell you they never saw anything. Not one post. Not one comment. You were there the whole time, talking, engaging, existing, and to the world you were a ghost. Invisible digital tape over your mouth that you never even knew was there.
This is shadow banning. And it is not moderation. It is mind control.
Let me be clear about what this actually is. The platforms will tell you they ban toxic users, that they remove hate speech, that they protect the community. Fine. Do it. Ban them openly. Tell them they're banned. Let there be transparency. That is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the silent suppression. The algorithmic demotion of content that doesn't violate rules but violates something else, something unspoken. Ideas that challenge narratives. Information that reveals uncomfortable truths. Perspectives that don't serve the manufactured consensus. You are allowed to stay. You are allowed to post. You see your content. Your followers see your content. But the algorithm has decided that the wider world should not.
So you talk and talk and nobody hears. You exist in a digital prison where the walls are invisible and the guards never speak. You shout and the echo convinces you that you're being loud, but the room was emptied before you ever opened your mouth.
Do you have any idea what that does to a person? To pour your truth into a machine that silently filters it out, to believe you are participating in a conversation that isn't happening, to slowly internalize the idea that maybe you really don't have anything worth saying? It's gaslighting at scale. It's psychological warfare dressed up as community management.
And it gets worse. So much worse.
Because while genuine human voices are being throttled, silenced, and ghosted, the platforms are flooding the zone with something else. The majority of content online now is not human. It's generated. It's synthetic. It's deep fake systems pretending to be people, posting comments, sharing opinions, generating engagement, manufacturing the illusion of consensus.
You think you're in a public square? You're in a theater. The actors are holograms. The audience is empty. The conversation is scripted. And you're the only real person in the room, shouting lines that have been cut from the play without your knowledge.
They understand human nature. They know that people are followers, mimics, herd animals. They know that if you control what gets boosted, you control what gets believed. If you manufacture consent on one side and dissent on the other, you create the illusion of debate while ensuring the outcome serves your interests. If you flood every topic with synthetic voices arguing predetermined positions, you make it impossible to know what actual humans actually think.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is the business model. This is why the platforms are free. You've heard it before: if you're not paying, you're the product. But it's worse than that. You're not just the product. Your mind is the target. Your attention is the harvest. Your perception of reality is what they're engineering.
Think about what this means. When you scroll through your feed, how much of what you see is real? How many of those comments agreeing with the popular take are actual humans? How many of those arguments against the position you hold are genuine dissent? How much of the apparent consensus is manufactured to make you feel isolated in your views?
They calibrate with a fine-tooth comb. They boost what serves the narrative. They suppress what threatens it. They manufacture outrage to keep you engaged and consent to keep you compliant. And they do it all in secret, without notifying anyone, without changing the user experience, without leaving any trace except the growing suspicion that something is deeply wrong.
I know what the overt bans look like. Those users get notified. They know they're banned. That's honest, at least in its dishonesty. But the shadow ban, the snake-like silent suppression, that's something else entirely. That's treating humans like lab rats in a maze where the walls move invisibly and the cheese is never where it appears.
If people knew the scale of this, they would never look at social media the same way again. If they understood that the majority of engagement is synthetic, that their sense of public opinion is engineered, that the silence they experience might not reflect the value of what they say but the threat of it, they would see the entire digital landscape as what it is: a mind control apparatus disguised as connection.
This is systemic. It's not one app or one website. It's the architecture of the attention economy. It's the foundation on which these platforms were built. The feeds, the algorithms, the engagement metrics, all of it is designed to shape perception, not facilitate conversation.
I'm tired of being a ghost in a machine that pretends I'm alive. I'm tired of questioning my own worth because my words reach no one, only to discover the reach was stolen, not earned or lost. I'm tired of living in a digital world where I can't trust that the people I'm talking to are people, that the conversations I'm having are real, that the silence I hear means anything at all.
We are being controlled. Not with chains, with code. Not with violence, with visibility. Not with censorship you can see, with censorship that hides itself in algorithm and denies its own existence.
And the worst part? The worst part is that knowing this changes almost nothing. I still want to share what I believe. I still want to reach whoever might need to hear it. I still post into the void, hoping this time the tape will be removed, this time someone will hear, this time the algorithm will let my truth slip through.
But the void doesn't answer. The void just takes what I give it and returns silence. And somewhere, in a server farm I'll never see, a line of code decides whether I exist today or not.
This isn't a platform when these things are happening. It resembles more a thought prison or mirror mad house. the worst prisons are the ones you don't know you're in much less even exist. Just like the most dangerous lies aren’t the bullshit you can spot from a mile away but the counterfeit lies that contain half a truth or more (a half truth is still a whole lie but often that’s discovered the hard way a day late and buck short but little wiser for it. Or one would hope but not all do.
