Episode #73: And You Censored Me Because...Why?

As most of my long time readers know, I'm incredibly squirrely when it comes to be moderated/censored. As in, I get seriously bent out of shape to the point where I often cut ties with the person/entity who did the censoring.

The censoring itself has been pretty much dormant for the past few years, beyond the occasional unfriending of those on FB who took exception to a comment(s) that I made on a post that they were unwilling to defend (easier to unfriend someone that it is to defend your point of view).

I say "dormant" since I've become much better at reading what a person's personal views are on a given topic, so I make it a point to be respective and simply "scroll on by", which is a concept utterly lost on 98% of Americans who lean left/progressive with their personal views. Instead, I keep my more "offensive" comments limited to the pages that I follow/suggested pages that I troll.

For the most part, this has worked fairly well for me. I play nice with people I like, and they play nice with me. Easy peasy. However, this year, there have been two occasions in which I've been taken to task and had verbiage removed, and I've had two noticeably different reactions to being called out.

1} I had a blog post removed from a writing group I belong to. This happened during the first week of January when protesters stormed Capitol Hill (IMO it was not "an insurrection"). I had posted it in the group for a prompt that day. One of the lovely admins (I genuinely mean that as a compliment) removed it and gave me a few thoughtful reasons as to why. I told her that I appreciated the sentiment, that there was no hard feelings on my end and that everything was good. Ultimately though, I probably prompted a tweaking to the group rules on what can and can't be posted in the group. 

2} This one is a bit more difficult to simply accept. I've become a bit more active on YouTube as of late and have posted dozens of comments over the past couple of years, some thought provoking and some funny/whimsical and all about the topic of the video being shown at the time. And none that violated the fluidity of the community guidelines. None. Earlier in the week, an acquaintance of a writing group I belonged to posted a video link to someone who talks about all things writing, which the topic of the video was about vanity publishing (of which the acquaintance was interviewed for the video). I made what I assumed to be an inoffensive comment about it, along with a suggestion about a website to check out, and also subscribed to the channel.

Maybe about an hour or so later, I went back to the video and saw that my comment was gone. Now there was nothing on the channel itself saying that comments were being moderated (like you can on blogs), so you can imagine that I was extremely upset about my comment being nuked. I left one about my comment being nuked and sure enough, that one never posted as well. Suffice to say, I was really upset about this and immediately unsubscribed to the channel. The owner eventually commented and offered to restore the comment. Long story short, I'm not quite sure what happened to my original comment. He said that it wasn't him that took it down, that it must've been YouTube. Personally, I find this hard to believe as all my previous comments have met/passed the various algorithms with flying colors, and only YouTube and the owner of a channel can remove comments they deem offensive/poor taste. In any event, I politely gave my two cents and wished him well with his channel.

So these were my most two recent bouts of censorship: one where my response was casual and understanding, and one where my response was not casual and understanding, but more to the point of being seriously ticked off and pledging to avoid the content creator for the future.

Censorship is fugly, but depending on where and what the circumstances are, can be, to a small degree, acceptable.

{c} 2021 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved