Overheard a student at the library say 'it's just a deleted post, who cares?'

I was at the university library in Madison yesterday, grabbing a coffee. Two students were talking nearby, and one said that exact line about a friend's social media post getting taken down. The other student just shrugged. It hit me hard because it wasn't 'just a post' to me. Ten years ago, I ran a small blog about local politics. One day, the whole site was gone. My host said I broke their rules, but they never said which rule. All those hours of writing, gone. That shrug from the student is the real problem, I think. When people see censorship as normal, they stop fighting it. Has anyone else had a moment where they saw how casual we've become about losing our words?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor_fox1mo ago

Man, that shrug is the worst part. I lost a whole forum thread once because a mod just didn't like the topic. Do you still have your old blog posts saved anywhere, like in a text file or an email you sent to yourself?

blake_smith1mo ago

Yeah, I read a whole article about that "digital shrug" problem.

ryang7719d ago

Yeah, I've got a couple of them saved in a notepad file from 2006, right next to my old AIM away messages. Blake Smith probably has his whole archive on a single floppy disk somewhere, still trying to recover it.