I was banished from Reddit by a robot
Reflections on non-ownership and the illusion of democratization
About a month ago, a robot banished me from Reddit. And I’m not using the word “banished” for comic effect (well, only partly). Rather, after reflecting on what happened, I feel that it’s the word that best describes what occurred, and “ban” doesn’t quite get the real meaning across (although I will use “ban” for brevity’s sake — what can I say, I’m a hypocrite).
Within one second of posting my last comment, over 50,000 words of my writing were scrubbed from Reddit. A month later, I’ve sent several emails to Reddit support that have gone unanswered, and two moderators (one of whom is a Buddhist monk) have reached out to Reddit to appeal on my behalf. Even their appeal has not received a response. I have not gotten any communication from Reddit at all — no explanation of why I was banished, no directives on how I can appeal. In fact, I wasn’t even told that I was banned. I just found that out on my own via an incognito tab. Then a few days later, my login stopped working. I was simply disappeared.
But let me be clear: my intent here is not to complain, but just to share some reflections on how this has impacted me, where I’ve been for the past few months, and how this has changed how I think about both my engagement with the internet, the world, and my spiritual practice — things that I think we all need to reckon with in this day and age.
This experience has forced me to consider how platforms have become so central to our lives, how we have come to rely on them, and what it means when they are policed by error-prone robots, when there is no due process, and when appeals go entirely unanswered — when we can be effectively banished or excommunicated from public life by an unelected governing body.
What happened?
In mid may, an automod seemingly misinterpreted something I wrote. In fact, two of the moderators of the subreddit I commented on told me the comment that got me banned was helpful, and they have both contacted Reddit support to attempt to get the ban reversed (if you’re reading this, thanks again). I would share the comment that led to the ban, but I’m concerned that if it got me banned from Reddit, it may get me banned here too due to trigger words. Substack is pretty lax, but still. Plus, it was in response to someone struggling with some very personal issues, so I don’t want to bring an influx of traffic to their personal post. Point being: this is not a case where I said something clearly abhorrent, racist, threatening, and I’m now complaining about the consequences of my actions. It’s a clear case of an algorithm operating unchecked.
So, what got me banned? The ban was likely a combination of a few factors. First, I metaphorically used the uncensored version of the word that means “to forcefully bring about someone’s death” followed by the word “you”. I was trying to support someone who was was in distress because they felt like they were out of control of their porn usage, and so I told them to be mindful of the feeling of compulsion that underlies it, noting that it might feel like abstaining will forcefully bring about their death, but it won’t (“it might feel like it will ____ you, but it won’t”). I imagine Reddit’s automod may have misread the “____ you” out of context as a direct threat.
Second, since the post was about porn, I discussed issues regarding coercion and lack of clear consent from the performers, which included some other potential trigger words, like one that rhymes with “ape”. And the topic is obviously sensitive overall.
Third, I use a VPN, which may have made Reddit flag my account for suspicious activity from the outset, leaving the automod with its finger on the trigger, ready to dole out a banishment as soon as I crossed that thin red line.
Overall, it seems there was a uniquely bad mix of ingredients here, each of which may have been okay on their own, but which together made Reddit’s automod go nuclear when it saw them all at once — and that’s actually fairly understandable, as seeing a comment from a sketchy IP that seemingly talks about “aping” and “billing” directed at another user seems like just about the worst possible thing that could come up in a comment.
It’s such an unfortunate recipe that it’s actually kind of funny when I imagine this little bodyless robot having an absolute panic attack when it saw that comment pop up, then patting itself on the back for getting rid of the threat. Good on you, automod. Your heart was in the right place, and I can’t blame you for your limited ability to understand human language — you didn’t choose to be this way.
But I can take issue with the lack of checks and balances around the usage of that robot. And I can blame myself for my own naïve reliance on these sorts of platforms (and more broadly, my reliance on anything).
Authoritarianism isn’t coming. It’s already here, just not in the way we expected it to be.
A bit dramatic, yes. But what can I say — I’ve been staring at this piece too long, and it’s a snappy heading. And what’s a personal reflection without a bit of cringe, anyway? So let me nip this in the bud: I’m obviously not saying that internet platforms are authoritarian in the same way or have anywhere near as bad effects as traditional totalitarian regimes (at least not yet). I’m pointing to a parallel structure here, one that we should be aware of before it ever gets close to that point.
There’s a lot of talk nowadays about the looming spectre of authoritarianism — right-wing nationalism is increasing around the world, and that political stance reliably leads to authoritarian governments.
The risk is real, and there is ongoing debate as to whether we have already slipped past the authoritarianism threshold or not in a standard political sense. But I want to put that aside for a moment and take a look at an area of our lives where authoritarianism has undeniably taken hold and has been there for years without our noticing — and, relatively speaking, without much complaining. Many people have sounded the alarm, and what I’m saying isn’t anything new, but I think it bears repeating.
In the modern age, we tend to think of government as a power that regulates public life. At least in the West, we largely draw a distinction between what occurs in private and in public: what we do in the privacy of our own homes or voluntary social units and does not spill out into the outside world in any significant way is thought to be the realm of individual freedom, but whatever we do in public and which may have an effect on others is kept within reasonable bounds by the government. This is a gross oversimplification, but it suffices for now. That government, at least in a modern conception, should be democratic: elected by the people so that they have a say about what is prescribed and proscribed.
Historically, that separation between public and private life was pretty clear cut: inside your house, out of the view of others, you are in private, and you are largely free of governmental responsibilities. When you step out your front door, you cross a threshold and enter the public sphere. There, you interact with others, and the government enters the picture to regulate your behavior so everyone can get along peaceably. Again, by modern moral standards, that governing body should be elected by the people who will be subject to its rules.
But these days, the divide between public life and private life is more obscure — or more transparent, depending on how you look at it: obscure in that the boundary is vague and fuzzy, transparent in that we reach through the boundary without even seeing that we’ve done so. From within a private space, we can simply reach into our pockets and become instantly transported into a public square or plaza — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. Access to at least some of these platforms is practically essential for much of modern life — or at least it has become essential for those who have already built their lives upon the infrastructure these platforms provide, which is quite a large number of people.
Sure, it’s possible to live without any of them, but it’s also possible to live in an off-grid cabin without running water or electricity, and yet those are legally considered essential services in many places. If you happen to be a professional creator of any sort, then being banned from Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and the like causes immediate and perhaps irreversible harm to your livelihood. If you’re a professional in a more traditional field, a ban from LinkedIn could cause irreparable harm to your reputation.
These platforms, then, are essentially public plazas and markets that provide space for private social clubs and businesses to operate in. From that perspective, they are public spaces and should be governed by an elected body. And yet, the platforms are treated as if they are the private businesses that they provide space for, not the body that governs the space and the businesses.
As more and more of our lives move online, these platforms hold increasing amounts of power, maintaining the ability to practically banish anyone from public life as a whole. Further, there is nothing stopping platforms from collaborating and wiping people’s presence from the internet entirely.
There’s much talk about the threat of slipping into a technocracy, but in my experience, that issue tends to be discussed in terms of far-future scenarios, under the illusion that the concern is tech companies building traditional cities, establishing governments on mars, or eventualities along those lines. What we often overlook is the fact that tech companies already wield more power than many governments, and a single person’s decision — or a single robot’s decision — can metaphorically wipe you off the face of the earth within just a moment. We acknowledge the overreaches of platforms like Facebook when it comes to issues like election influence, but we don’t seem to connect it to a more fundamental burgeoning authoritarian structure.
And with the largest platform, Meta, trying to bridge that digital-physical divide by constructing a metaverse that we’ll ideally (from their point of view) inhabit, tech companies don’t need to set up cities in the world as we know it, but they can simply set up virtual localities that are functionally equivalent to cities but which bypass standard governments through a sort of private-business loophole. If governments don’t begin to think ahead, we might find ourselves absorbed into a new quasi-physical world that is run by the iron fist of Mark Zuckerberg.
This is nothing new, but it’s worth a reminder that tech companies already wield extraordinary power over the real world. After all, Twitter serves as a primary mode of communication for many people — sort of like a radio — and yet they banned the acting president of the United States from it back in 2020. This was not simply a decision not to report what he said, but an active restriction of the highest official in the most powerful nation in the world without any due process. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum and whether you think the ban was warranted, you can still be concerned about the process by which it was implemented: the ban was carried out by people who weren’t even indirectly elected (for example, the Supreme Court), but by people who have absolutely no tie to the democratic process and with no clear avenues of recourse or for trial laid out.
Democratization through authoritarianism
What is perhaps most concerning about this is that we have spoken about these platforms as a democratization of content creation and expression — we no longer have to go through the gatekeepers of publishers, networks, etc. to express our ideas.
That is true, but the flip side is that no single publisher, network, or broadcaster ever had the amount of power that a single one of these platforms does — if one publisher rejected your book, you could go to another (theoretically, at least — blacklisting has always been a concern). But if you are banned from social media, then no matter what you do, you are completely dead in the water, no matter whether you find another publisher or publish yourself, as you’ll have practically no way to market the book. After all, even Google can just simply decide to not allow you to appear in search.
In that sense, this “democratization” is something of doublespeak: it is democracy through authoritarianism, freedom so long as we live in constant uncertainty under the panopticon of the algorithm.
In most dictatorships, people tend to think they’ll be safe if they do the right thing. But the problem is that, under authoritarian rule, there is no way to know what the “right thing” is. We find out only what it was in hindsight: my comment was apparently not the right thing. But now it’s too late.
A foundational tenet of modern justice is that one must be able to know the law beforehand. This prevents rulers from selectively applying the law, making up post-hoc regulations on the spot to punish individuals that the king simply doesn’t like. But when excommunication and banishment are based on vague Terms of Service violations that have no clear guidelines and can be applied on a whim, then we are precisely in that feared situation: we are forced to live in fear of the all-seeing eye of the algorithm, never quite sure if we’re about to be disappeared or not. That is not what I would call democratization. That is what I would call an inversion of the truth: freedom only through submission to the sovereign.
What I make of all this personally
If you’ve been following this Substack, you may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. After I got suspended from Reddit, which was one of the primary outlets I used to share my writing, I started considering the safety of continuing to publish here. In the past, I had seen at least one person mention suddenly being banned from Substack for “no reason”, but after looking into their history, I saw that they clearly were posting highly antisemitic content. From that, I fooled myself into the sense of safety I described above, thinking that so long as I followed all the rules, I would be safe to post here. Classic.
But after this experience with Reddit — seeing how within seconds, hours and hours worth of writing completely evaporated, my presence almost entirely wiped from the site — I began to question that. After all, I had chosen to write on Substack because I thought it would give me more control over my work than going through traditional publishers would — the “democratization” that’s so often spoken of. And while that is true in some sense, it is also entirely false in others.
Overall, this has led me to reflect more on the complete non-ownership I have of phenomena: seeking control is a doomed pursuit. In that way, my suspension from Reddit has been oddly pleasant, a putting-down of a burden.
It brings to mind the classic Zen story of the man and the horse: a man’s son gets awarded a horse, and the villagers tell him how fortunate he is. The man simply says, “maybe”. The next day, his son falls off the horse, breaking his leg. The villagers now tell the man how unfortunate this is, and again he just says, “maybe.” Then, the king’s army comes through the village, drafting young men to fight in a new war. Seeing that the man’s son is lame, they skip over him, saving him from near certain death. The villagers again tell the man how fortunate he is, and he once again tells them: “maybe”.
At first the ban struck me as something negative, but I’m seeing how this forced confrontation with fundamental insecurity has been one of the most productive things to happen in several years.
Practically, this has led me to consider how I should proceed with this Substack. I’m going to continue developing it, the question is simply how. I may make a shift towards more personal, stream-of-consciousness, short(er)-form pieces, like this one, instead of the longer, highly-structured, 4,000-plus-word pieces that I’ve been writing so far. Those longer pieces may end up on a site I control, or maybe I’ll submit them to traditional publications that are at least transparent about the lack of control I have when submitting to them — after all, in a Buddhist sense, the elimination of ignorance comes from being honest about how little control we have. Or maybe I’ll just keep posting them here. Either way, I’ll provide everyone on this newsletter with a way to see them.
This leaves me with a question for all of you: what would you like to see here? What pieces have resonated with you the most? One of the things I like about Substack is the ability to really start a conversation with people, and I take a very responsive approach to my writing: several of my pieces on here are responses to other pieces. I’d like to build on that.