Loading…
3
I've logged 1,247 takedown notices across 9 platforms since January and the number that actually got a human review was zero
Started keeping a spreadsheet back in January after a mod on a Discord server deleted a post of mine about a city council meeting in Spokane. I figured it was one bad apple. Nine months later the sheet has 1,247 rows. Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, TikTok, Discord, a Substack, a small phpBB forum, and X. I track the date, the platform, what got pulled, whether I appealed, and whether a person ever wrote back.
The popular take in this community is that these companies are sitting on elaborate censorship machines with teams of people deciding what stays up. I don't buy it anymore. What I found is closer to a vending machine. You put in an appeal, a bot spits out a template, and nobody ever sees it. Of the 1,247, I got 340 auto replies. Zero came from a named human. I sent 11 formal records requests and got back pages of canned policy with the actual decision logs blacked out.
I know that sounds less scary than a room full of censors. But I think it's scarier. Nobody is deciding. The rules get written once, the model enforces them, and the appeal is just another machine talking to a machine. When I finally got one real reply in June it was from a contractor in Manila who said she handles 400 cases a day and has 90 seconds per case. That was the only time I felt like a person on the other end existed at all.
Curious if anyone else keeps a log like this and what your human response rate looks like. Mine is zero out of 1,247 and I want to know if I'm just unlucky or if that number is normal.
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
the_max3d ago
My buddy hit 800 appeals on Twitch and only one got a real reply, so zero seems normal.
6