Hit 50 blocked articles in my feed reader last month

I keep a feed reader for local news in about 10 countries. Last month I noticed I had 50 articles marked as blocked or taken down just from one region in Southeast Asia. Turns out their government has a keyword filter that catches anything with "pollution" or "factory" in the headline. I tracked it for 30 days straight and only 3 of those articles ever went back up. Has anyone else run into a specific keyword trigger like that somewhere else?

2 comments

2 Comments

william_taylor3d agoMost Upvoted

Yikes, that's wild but not surprising at all... I had a buddy who ran a tiny yacht charter business out of Indonesia and he'd post local weather updates with "haze" or "burn" in them. They'd get flagged and shadowbanned from his own feed within hours. He just stopped posting about the air quality altogether after the third strike.

angelac633d ago

Oh man, I hit the same thing in Vietnam last year. I had a feed for environmental news and anything with "coal" or "power plant" in the title just disappeared within 24 hours. I kept a spreadsheet for two months and out of 47 flagged articles, only 2 ever came back. The weird part was that one of them went up and down three times before they finally gave up and just left it dead.