https://old.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1k52y62/oc_distraction_tactics/mof3qpd/
content of forbidden unpublished comment:
It’s blatant fascism in its first stages.
I have witnessed that people throw the word “fascism” out as a thought-terminating cliché in year 2024 and year 2025, to end conversation and stop thinking.
fascism in its first stages.
Bill Moyers, who used to be a director in the White House, and has direct education from Joseph Campbell when he filmed the Power of Myth series with George Lucas back in 1986 and 1987 already declared it was first stage back in March 2016. https://billmoyers.com/story/trump-the-american-fascist/
We are so far beyond first-stage in April 2025. But beyond that, what concerns me in my message you replied to is that it people don’t recognize that all dehumanization / mass dehumanization is bad. People seem to get very fixated on single topics like gender and “red states” vs “blue states” and not goodness itself. People are flocking to values of “Hate Harder”, and I don’t care if they are MAGA or against MAGA, support Trump or hate Donald Trump, if they are preaching dehumanization and “hate harder” then they are adding fuel to the bonfire of humanism.
Do you mean Steve “spez” Huffman? A paid reddit employee (An Admin)? A volunteer user moderator of the comics subreddit? In any of those cases, the comment is currently visible so… ?
The moderators must have released it. I just now got a reply to the comment.
It was the OWNERS, which is more than just Spez. It’s the people who write the server-side code, not the moderators.
They do not notify you, they just do not publish even for a single second. they even make it seem falsely that your comment is there, you have to check out-of-band to see that it is not published. The Spam Filters have been weaponized by Russia against Americans on Reddit and many other media platforms.
In fact, I just replied to a reply and IT TOO is not being published.
https://old.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1k52y62/oc_distraction_tactics/mofcga7/
content:
There will be no balance until a correction is made.
Yes. The entire social media society needs to make a massive change away from junk noise content and educate all people, voters and even those too young to legally vote, on two key topics:
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Mass psychosis, how an entire society becomes mentally sick
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Media ecology, we all need to study the 184 page book and teach each other using front-page postings and Hashtags for at least 6 months. Neil Postmans book “Amusing Ourselves To Death”
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
It was the OWNERS, which is more than just Spez. It’s the people who write the server-side code, not the moderators.
So the paid reddit employees, the admins.
They do not notify you, they just do not publish even for a single second. they even make it seem falsely that your comment is there, you have to check out-of-band to see that it is not published
Thats literally just what automod does, which is a automated moderator tool. You can be hit by the spam filter of the website (In my experience just for using link shorteners, not much else) but the overwhelming majority of non-batant spam removals are automod rules set up by user moderators.
Without looking behind the curtain I could make guesses as to why those comments were removed (One guess that frequently is the case, a low karma filter, another guess would be some prior shitter had a term they used a lot, so the mods filtered it.), but I couldn’t say with certainty.
I’ve been in social media since the early 1980’s. I know how all this works. I used to work for Paul Allen and Bill Gates as a consultant and on Paul Allen’s private staff, I’m a published author on media systems and an expert on spam filtering.
Silent removal (or never publishing, even for a single second) is unethical and bad, especially how it manipulates you as creator into appearing as if your comment was published - and you wonder why nobody replies or upvotes. It’s manipulative. My Reddit account is over 15 years old, the spam filters have clear patterns of Russian manipulation / weaponized agitation to remove content on important keywords and author names.
I’m not sure why you are here defending Reddit against someone calling it out who clearly knows what the fuck they are talking about. But it’s very sus.
I’ve been in social media since the early 1980’s.
Legit question: What social media existed in the early 80’s? Usenet? Were you a big name on a dial-in BBS?
I used to work for Paul Allen and Bill Gates as a consultant and on Paul Allen’s private staff, I’m a published author on media systems and an expert on spam filtering.
I was a reddit mod for over a decade. I wrote automod rules for subreddits with several million users and dealt with the reddit spam filters on various occasions. Not to take away from your experiences, but I think I have a pretty good knowledge of this very specific set of systems that we’re discussing now.
Silent removal (or never publishing, even for a single second) is unethical and bad, especially how it manipulates you as creator into appearing as if your comment was published - and you wonder why nobody replies or upvotes. It’s manipulative.
Never said it wasn’t. The only discussion I’m having with you is whether or not it was the paid reddit employees who removed it or volunteer user moderators, and I’m inclined to think its the latter based on the fact that it was later approved and visible. A user moderator wouldn’t be able to override the admins removing it, or rather wouldn’t even try because the admins would then take action against that user moderator. My personal inclination is that your post got filtered by automod and later approved by a user moderator. Admittedly it could also have somehow fallen into an actual spam filter, but that tends to be much rarer, especially for an account with some karma and age. I suppose it could also be that billmoyers.com is on reddit.com spam filter, you could check that by posting with a alt in a subreddit you mod and see what happens.
My Reddit account is over 15 years old
Mine was too until reddit banned it during the API protest.
I’m not sure why you are here defending Reddit against someone calling it out who clearly knows what the fuck they are talking about.
I’m not defending reddit. I’m pointing out that you’re assigning blame to the reddit admins when it’s not definitively them doing something.
But it’s very sus.
vOv If you think it’s that suspicious by all means block or ban me. I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
vOv If you think it’s that suspicious by all means block or ban me. I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
I don’t support book burning, blocking content I disagree with. That’s nazi Germany shit. You know they didn’t have the Apple iPhone and Unicode text in 1935 Germany? They had to burn actual books and magazines printed on paper. Many people seem to invite book burning and say “bring it on”, I don’t.
I’m pointing out that you’re assigning blame to the reddit admins when it’s not definitively them doing something.
Automated systems they don’t publish the rues on topic is their responsibility. Why do you keep deflecting for them? This is not a human judgement, this is code server-side at time of publication.
A user moderator wouldn’t be able to override the admins removing it
I am in NO WAY saying a human “admin” or “owner” removed it by hand. It is INSTANT, under 1/4 second that I can see it never gets into the comment queue, it is server-side filtered, I’m talking about who programs the server-side code and allows a system of spam filtering and automod that does not publish the rules. They - THE CODE AUTHORS and SITE OWNERS - FORBID topics on front-page communities that in no way are hostile to anything but Russia’s information warfare (“Internet Research Agency”) and Cambridge Analytica topics.
I filed bug report after bug report that whenever I posted a specific link to the BBC, it would get filtered off: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192
Why was this August 24, 2018 story being unpublished by Reddit servers on ANY community during the 2020 / 2021 pandemic?
99% of the Reddit community doesn’t even realize their comments don’t get published. I go through people’s profiles and see many are unpublished and they never comment about it. You can see them ONLY in the profile page. The keywords and patterns are rather predictable in some circumstances, so I can often predict which ones to spot-check.
I’m not talking about hate-messages or attacking other users here, I’m talking about certain topics of Donald Trump, Russian / Kremlin information warfare, etc. Even specific USA teachers (from the 1990’s) I have found about media ecology and “War Against Reality” topics (Russian information warfare methods). And Reddit is NOT the only systems to have these targeted patterns of suppressing certain teachers / educators / books when mentioned with identifiable keywords.
you could check that by posting with a alt in a subreddit you mod and see what happens.
I already do, it is only on front-page postings that they have a different set of filter rules in place. I’ve been analyzing this problem since 2015 when I contacted the Pentagon specifically about Reddit infiltration by someone waging Hybrid Warfare / state-level sophistication. “I reported it in 2015 under Biden/Obama! At the time, I did not know it was Russia attacking social media, but I knew it was hard core Joseph Campbell / Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller level Mythology, and I reported it! I was BOOTS on the Ground in North Africa Arab Spring, December 2010. I know my shit!”
Automated systems they don’t publish the rues on topic is their responsibility. Why do you keep deflecting for them? This is not a human judgement, this is code server-side at time of publication.
The automoderator bot was integrated into the website years ago, so yeah, it’s going to be instantaneous. The rules for automoderator are still put in place by volunteer human moderators. You mod a couple subreddits, you can verify that you can put in rules yourself on the automoderator config page for any of them.
I am in NO WAY saying a human “admin” or “owner” removed it by hand. It is INSTANT, under 1/4 second that I can see it never gets into the comment queue, it is server-side filtered, I’m talking about who programs the server-side code and allows a system of spam filtering and automod that does not publish the rules.
Refer to previous comment. Also, publishing automod or spam filters just tells potential bad actors they’ve been found out, leading to them adjusting accordingly. Personally I’d set automod to notify folks on some things (Usually just not having enough karma), but not, say, slurs. To wit: here’s the regex we used just to catch variations of the n-bomb in several subreddits-
n[i!j1e]+gg?(rs?|ett?e?s?|lets?|ress?e?s?|r[a0oe]s?|[ie@ao0!]rs?|r[o0]ids?|ab[o0]s?|erest)99% of the Reddit community doesn’t even realize their comments don’t get published. I go through people’s profiles and see many are unpublished and they never comment about it. You can see them ONLY in the profile page. The keywords and patterns are rather predictable in some circumstances, so I can often predict which ones to spot-check.
A lot of communities use automod. A lot of stuff can get false flagged by automod configs depending on how anal retentive or bad at doing it the writer of the individual config is. Scunthorpe and all that.
The rules for automoderator are still put in place by volunteer human moderators. You mod a couple subreddits, you can verify that you can put in rules yourself on the automoderator config page for any of them.
I KNOW ALL THIS. You keep deflecting the OWNERS of the site, as if they are not responsible for what goes on with secret manipulation of content!
A lot of stuff can get false flagged
Yha, which is why I have been tracking the problem since 2015! It isn’t accidental on certain topics. You seem extremely gullible or here to promote gullibility among social media users. You should see the changes since October 7, 2023 Palestine terrorism attack in the Middle East! (Which is also Putin’s birthday). Massive filtering is being done on topics and it is being done in secret, concealed from both the author of the comments and other consumers (there is no message that a comment was removed, no tombstone appears), and nobody is talking about it. People on Reddit only talk about being banned, not for this NEVER-PUBLISHED server-side filtering of topics.
I suggest you face up to your attitude if you aren’t outright being insincere just to waste my time.
Mastadon Hashtag “Gullible USA”: https://mastodon.social/tags/GullibleUSA
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“Michael Tomasky. April 21, 2025. Fooled Again Who Were Those Gullible People Who Believed Donald Trump’s Bullshit? His campaign promises, from peace in Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many people believed him.” - https://newrepublic.com/article/194176/donald-trump-voters-gullible-lies-ukraine-tariffs
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October 19, 2024 - “America’s gullibility crisis. by Zachary Basu. In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies. Why it matters: Human gullibility is not a new phenomenon. But social media and polarized politics are exposing it at industrial scale” - https://www.axios.com/2024/10/19/musk-ackman-election-misinformation
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“The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, published 2019-
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