It's how the Reddit spam filter works. Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked. Eventually the account would be deleted, all the post you've ever made would also be gone in the worst-case scenario, just like my previous account.
My Reddit account was banned because I was posting from Tor. I've registered successfully via Tor and was able to use it without any problems for 6 months or so. One day, I was suddenly shadowbanned. I guess it was because the exit node I happened to be using that day was on a "kill on sight" spam blocklist.
I always posted in good faith and never got into any flamewar, a few links I shared were well-received by the subs.
Recently it almost happened again with my current account, but this time I was not global shadowbanned and it seemed to be just a local spam filter (many subreddits have their own anti-spam policies and auto-moderation queues). I sent a message to the Subreddit admin and I was able to post again. But after this incident I've completely stopped accessing my Reddit account via Tor.
> At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked.
Seems like they're following Google's strategy. Presumably, ad profit from each individual user is low enough that it's cheaper to accept false positives in their anti-abuse mechanism than it is to provide a functioning appeal process. Maybe if the user manages to go viral on Twitter or HN with their story they could get it reversed. Going viral with stories of false-positive bans is the primary way to restore a Google account, it probably works for Reddit too. Normal people have to suck eggs.
At least losing a Reddit account is less life-disrupting for most people than losing their Google account.
It's the strategy of all the major social players.
Several months ago I followed a new cardistry (look it up) personality on Instagram. I scrolled through and "liked" one or two dozen of their performance clips, out of the hundreds that they've posted. My Instagram account was blocked, for "manipulation" or some verbiage like that. Basically, the algorithm thought that I was a bot hired to inflate that person's numbers.
The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it. I did this, but never got any kind of response. My Instagram account that I had for 5-10 years is just gone.
Turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I created a new account attached to the same phone and email address (somehow THIS isn't detected as abuse?). But I just lost interest in the app, and life seems to be better now for having done so. If Reddit ever nukes me, then it would be the kick in the ass that I need to stop wasting time on that toxic site as well.
Using a proxy or VPN also sounds like things a spammer would do, and this is also why Reddit would care and autoban these accounts. But the point of this thread is that, these anti-spam mechanisms always cause collateral damages (like some of us in this thread) and the experience can get really frustrating when that happens.
I recently learned about the kik strategy for handling child porn via Darknet Diaries[1]. If you can't actually tell anyone at kik about child porn, kik can't know about it and if nobody at kik knows about it then they're apparently not required to do anything about it.
What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit."
Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.
Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things like this so that checks the safe harbor requirement apparently.
But... all the people they claim to have on their "Safety Board" haven't worked for kik for years and all efforts to contact anyone on twitter or anywhere fail. Even DMCA takedowns of revenge porn were being ignored now. It seems to be a dead platform that nevertheless gets app updates uploaded so something is still going on somewhere by someone.
Basically the only option they were discussing was getting the app removed from Google and Apple stores and they compared the situation to Parler where the app was pulled for failing to moderate. And yet kik seems to get a pass somehow. It's a very disturbing and frustrating episode.
This would be easy to prosecute, assuming the allegations are true. They don’t have a working DMCA contact, so they lose safe harbor. They could have the lawyer testify that her client’s underage nudes and related dmca takedowns were never removed, despite court order to take them down. That’s obviously not a special case, so they could spot check a few dozen prior cases, and show non-compliance for those too.
Of course, doing that would cut off a stream of easy pedophile convictions. The prosecutor’s office might like the status quo. It certainly helps increase their metrics.
Makes you wonder if it's deliberately kept up to allow easy transmission of that kind of material... giving CSAM traffickers ample rope to hang themselves, as it were.
I don't know about VPNs specifically, but stories of Google handing out automated, unappealable permabans are rampant. There's one on the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201
Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.
why wouldn't they? modern browsers constantly snitch on all sorts of things, including IP addresses (I say 'snitch' because so few people outside the industry are aware of even this basic fact/practice), so it's not unlikely they would have some automated banning tool. and the banned google accounts we hear about when some knowledge worker on here goes viral have fallen victim to those tools/systems.
Shadow banning is such a disgusting practice. It's basically sweeping the "problem" under the rug, whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong.
It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.
Edit: to clarify, I'm totally fine with this tool being employed to combat spam(bots). Just not against normal posters/contributors.
> It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.
I really dislike "it should be illegal" for things like this. It's itself a lazy solution against a hard problem. It seems to often be used as shorthand for "I don't like this and I want it to stop". But making things illegal isn't a magic "make it stop" button. (Hello, War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, etc).
If you want to involve the Government in solving your problem, you now must also account for:
* What is the exact text of a law against this that could actually make it through any particular Congressional body?
* How will possible violations of this law be reported and investigated?
* How will that law be misused by malicious prosecutors and investigators to hassle and punish anybody they don't like?
* How will all of the actors involved actually change their behavior in ways that you didn't expect in order to avoid being targeted for either well-intentioned or malicious prosecution for possible violation of these new laws?
Example: Say I run a pseudonymous social media site resembling Reddit, and shadowbanning is the only thing keeping it from being a hopeless pit of spam right now. If I can't shadowban anymore, maybe my only solution is to require hard proof of identity for all users at least as strict as the KYC your banks use. Now everything you ever post is hard-linked to your identity. Even if not publicly shown normally, it's vulnerable to hacks, malicious employees, or Government requests. That would obviously benefit the Government, so there's a little incentive for them to implement and enforce any such law in such a way that sites are effectively forced to do this. Whoops, we just made the problem worse.
I don't disagree with you, let's play devils advocate: To be fair to the companies, the amount of work to fight off bots and bad accounts is quite complicated, costly (both financially, quality of site, reputation wise) and similar to all kinds of frauds gets increasingly more challenging as the fraudsters improve their game. Add in managing the people who are purposely incendiary and not bots.
The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small. Should they have a better system to get accounts re-activated? Probably - would make sense that they cast a wide net and then have a relatively easy way out for real individuals who can prove identify. Is that perfect? Heck no.
> The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small.
I don't believe that this is the case, though. Subreddit mods often seem to use it against counter-narrative type of posts - a single post could get you shaddow-banned for life on 50 subreddits that all happen to be under that mod's control. Happens often enough.
As I mentioned I'm fine with this tool being used against spam.
Off the top of my head, it seems self-evident that we can't assess the effectiveness of the filters without actual data. You may hear hundreds of complaints of 'false positives', but bots rarely complain, so those hundreds of false positives may be the collateral damage from blocking either a single bot or hundreds of millions of bots.
Although I'm not normally massively against using anecdotal data for hypothesis building, in this case, it seems as though without actual data, it'd be silly to comment further.
What if they just started shadow banning African Americans? Would that be illegal? This is a serious qeustion. If we have no idea on who they are shadow banning how can we tell if they are not being discriminatory?
I'm not talking about regular bans, I'm talking about shadow banning.
In case you're not familiar with the concept: it entails "muting" an account without ever notifying said account of that fact. They can still post, comment, vote, and everything else, but no one will see this content.
Sorry, I should have worded that a little more clearly, but my statement applies to shadow banning as well. In my view, it is totally unreasonable to make arbitrary software behavior like shadow banning illegal.
I totally get it when it's used solely to combat spam(bots), but, at least on Reddit, this tool's use has become too widespread and hits too many normal community contributors.
Edit: I'd just like it to be not allowed by law to hopefully curtail its use. I don't really care about what the repercussions of doing it anyway might look like.
Its a great tool to combat nefarious personae (both bots and humans). Its like a tarpit for smtpd/sshd (spamd on OpenBSD). Reddit is a free service to use, so it stands within reason their support dept. (which you'd contact concerning (shadow)bans) is sub-par. For paid subscribers, I would want my money (and time) back.
>whilst leaving the "problem" completely in the dark with regards to what it was they did wrong.
This is the original intent.
As far as I understood shadowbanning was for nefarious actors such as spambots, manual spammers, etc so they'd keep going without automatically creating new accounts.
Shadowbans are different from permanent bans or suspensions the OP has gotten. You at least you know you are banned when you're permabanned/suspended. Reddit claimed at one large incident of outrage over shadowbans that shadowbans were only intended for bots and that no actual humans should ever be shadowbanned and that they would rectify it after messaging admin. My account randomly got shadowbanned a few months ago and I got crickets via support/admin. They really don't give a shit and it shows in the quality of the content and comments.
If your account gets shadow banned and you don't notice does it really matter? You are still getting something out or you wouldn't keep posting. Sometimes just posting to yourself is enough.
Say you do notice, you just start a new account for free. Bonus points for moving identities and breaking existing tracking history.
>basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked
Not sure it would even matter. I once submitted a breaking news story to /r/news and it was autodeleted by their bot. I messaged a mod asking why it was deleted since it was in fact news and was not a duplicate and their response was to tell me I'm stupid and to permaban me from the sub.
These are completely different issues. I was talking about a network-wide ban performed automatically by Reddit server-side anti-spam mechanisms, it's not about the internal policies or moderations (whether auto or manual) of a specific subreddit.
I've had this happen. The top post on /r/worldnews was an Israeli "attack on Gaza", with no mention of the rocket attack on Israel an hour prior. I posted a link to a site - an English-language Arabic news site, mind you - that stated that the Israeli "attack on Gaza" was a precision strike against the military target that fired rockets at Israel earlier in the day.
My submission was deleted, my account was banned from the sub.
>Once your account is flagged as spam by the system, it would be global shadowbanned automacially. At this stage, your account is essentially finished, it's basically impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked.
FWIW I had that happen to me a year or two ago and was able to get the ban overturned.
Doesn’t reflect my experience. Created new reddit account once and noticed its content was getting 0 engagement anywhere, ever. Contacted support, and in two weeks or so, they replied apologising because the account “mistakenly tripped their spam filters”. Account is now unshadowbanned
> Recently it almost happened again with my current account
(Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address,) were your two different accounts that were (1) permanently banned and (2) temporarily banned using the same email address?
> Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address
Interesting, didn't know that. But the E-mail addresses are different.
My previous account was initially shadowbanned without notice (all posts auto-filtered, and if I remember it correctly, it was a global shadowban on all subreddits) so I had stopping using that account. Weeks later I checked again and it became permanently banned explicitly. The system said,
> Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account has been permanently closed. To continue using Reddit, please log out and create a new account (the username [REDACTED] cannot be reused). This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
My current account in question was temporarily shadowbanned. I was able to post in a subreddit without problems, and one day I was suddenly shadowbanned. But it was not a global one because I was able to post in another subreddit, so I suspect it was just an Auto-Moderation filter. After I sent a message to the mod of that subreddit (not Reddit admins) and stopped logging in via Tor, the account went back to normal again. But I never actually received a reply from the mod, I'm not sure how exactly I got unbanned - automatically due to a "good" IP, or manually by a mod.
I had a ten year old account that was banned for not having an email address. There were various warnings asking me to supply the email address. I refused and the account was deleted. No issues other than this.
Take your E-mail address seriously. After a security incident, Reddit sysadmins may force an E-mail verification and password reset. I lost my first Reddit account (Yes, I lost two Reddit accounts) because of that - the E-mail address was gone since a long time ago but I didn't bother to change that, so I couldn't complete the verification.
> impossible to talk to someone and get your account unblocked
Hence why Reddit will only and ever remain a tool for consumer to consumer communication, and why a business would be stupid to use it as a primary marketing channel.
Mainly because I hate trackers. These days I'm using Tor for at least half of my web browsing. My desktop also runs QubesOS, the web browsers (both Tor Browser and the regular browser) are in their own disposable VMs. Once the window is closed, the system is reset and whatever cookies or exploits would all be gone permanently.
My Reddit account was banned because I was posting from Tor. I've registered successfully via Tor and was able to use it without any problems for 6 months or so. One day, I was suddenly shadowbanned. I guess it was because the exit node I happened to be using that day was on a "kill on sight" spam blocklist.
I always posted in good faith and never got into any flamewar, a few links I shared were well-received by the subs.
Recently it almost happened again with my current account, but this time I was not global shadowbanned and it seemed to be just a local spam filter (many subreddits have their own anti-spam policies and auto-moderation queues). I sent a message to the Subreddit admin and I was able to post again. But after this incident I've completely stopped accessing my Reddit account via Tor.