Saw a whole protest get wiped from social media while I was in Berlin last week

I was visiting a friend in Berlin and we walked past a small climate protest near Alexanderplatz. Maybe 50 people with signs about a local pipeline project. I took a couple pictures and posted a short video to my usual social media account, nothing crazy. The next morning, my post was gone. No notice, no email, just vanished from my feed. My friend's post about the same protest was also removed, and when we searched for hashtags related to the event, we found nothing but old, unrelated content. It was like the whole thing never happened online, even though we physically saw it. This wasn't a huge global story, just a local gathering, but the complete digital erasure felt really intentional. Has anyone else noticed platforms quietly removing content about smaller, real-world protests in specific cities?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean_park81mo ago

Whoa, that's super wild. I had a buddy who was at a small housing rights gathering in Brooklyn a couple years back, filmed the whole thing for his stories, and the next day every single clip from that location had been quietly removed from his story archive (no notification or anything, just gone). He only noticed because he went back to rewatch something from that day and the whole timeline was broken up.

elliotr392mo ago

Couldn't it just be a normal content filter mistake? Those systems are automated and flag tons of stuff by accident, especially with crowd photos that might get caught by generic rules. Maybe the algorithm linked your video to some old, banned protest page from that location.

the_joel2mo ago

Yeah, that's totally possible. I've had travel videos flagged before for no clear reason. What worked for me was just filing a simple appeal through the help page, and it got sorted pretty fast.