> gonna need to give this a listen

Great! Feel free to share your thoughts here any time. It would be nice to get some discussion going between moderators and users. Quite often, such discussions are dominated by one or the other, and as a result the opposing perspective may feel it's not worth it to speak out.

I would encourage everyone to reject their instincts on that. If you have an opinion on this, there's no better time than now to say it, here or elsewhere. Awareness of how things get moderated, whether by human or algorithm, is growing. We can all be part of that conversation.

> Twitter btw and their outright denial of shadowbannng

Yeah, I see a lot of results in Google scholar for ["twitter shadowban"](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=twitter+shadowban), though I haven't reviewed them.

I know Kelley Cotter wrote a paper on it regarding Instagram saying the same thing,

[*"Shadowbanning is not a thing": black box gaslighting and the power to independ

gonna need to give this a listen (I did the "reply guy" thing to George on Twitter, who as you pointed out, has a very aggressive algorithmic shadowban regime in place but they won't ever call it by that term).

more on Twitter btw and their outright denial of shadowbannng (look into what they call *healthy conversations* though for more [on what they do](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/Serving_Healthy_Conversation.html)):

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1022658436704731136?lang=en

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning

To give this post a chance to land on people's home pages, I've temporarily set the subreddit to restricted mode. I'll open it up again in a few days.

Thanks for your feedback. I see two implied questions,

> (1) Why are comments marked as automatically removed, whereas posts are marked as removed by Reddit as spam?

The answer is that I like to keep the labels short, and adding the word "automatically" to the "Reddit (spam)" label doesn't add much. Note that the "Reddit (spam)" posts do still appear when you select the action "auto-removed": https://www.reveddit.com/v/CantSayAnything/?removedby=automod

> (2) Why doesn't the removal reason, "removing all comments", appear on your profile's view of the comment?

That removal reason comes from the subreddit's mod log, which must be checked per subreddit. In theory, I could perform several lookups from profile pages wherever mod logs exist, but it isn't worth the added bandwidth and time to do so.

The salient point for users right now is that something *has* been removed. *Why* it was removed is a secondary question. For that, Reveddit has a `message mods` button that prefills a messa

Thanks for the reply and the additional information and reading. It's all very interesting and kind of annoying.

I'm not a moderator anywhere, so ran a couple of tests on CantSayAnything. The first was a submission, the second was a comment to that submission.

Depending on whether I'm using reveddit to check the sub or to check my profile, I get different results.

 Viewing the sub, it shows "removed by Reddit (spam)." The additional details do note the possibility of an automod. All submissions show that same message.

If I view the comments to that submission, it shows the message "removed] automatically | Removing all comments."

Viewing my profile, the submission shows the "spam" notice and the comment shows "[removed] automatically" and "[orphaned] link removed".

Thanks for creating this tool and bringing awareness to the issues of shadow moderation.

> One of the things that really irks me is that it is effectively impossible to find out the real reason a post has been removed.

I think this will naturally follow when authors know about what is getting removed. Reasons may be infrequently provided now because historically users did not know about the removals in the first place. Reddit still does not ping authors when a post is removed, and they only introduced the [Post removal details](https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/e66fql/post_removal_details_on_the_new_design_redesign/) sticky note a little over two and a half years ago. Further, there are several scenarios where that removal notice will not appear. See: [*Reddit does not tell me my post is removed. Why does Reveddit say it is?*](https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#reddit-does-not-say-post-removed)

Maybe some day users will start knowing about removals more often. At that point, if reasons are still not provided, then I would expect users to raise that issue more 

I finally got a chance to listen. It was a good conversation and I learned more about moderation philosophy than I thought there was to know!

One of the things that really irks me is that it is effectively impossible to find out the real reason a post has been removed. Even removal notifications are frequently hiding behind ambiguous language or ambiguous rules.

I understand that automatic removal might need to be expressed ambiguously, although, being an algorithm, it should be possible to link to the ruleset in use.

One of the valuable things we get from human moderation is the ability to enforce a rule based on the spirit or intent of the rule. Of course, that leads to a certain amount of subjectivity and ambiguity, but it should still be possible to reference the specific rule and to discuss how it can be clarified.

What I would like to see in any moderation system is that removal happens only with explicit reference to the rule being enforced. It shouldn't be possible to hide 

On an episode of *Using the Whole Whale*, George and I discuss [*What is SHADOW moderation &amp; how is it silencing speech?*](https://www.wholewhale.com/podcast/what-is-shadow-moderation-how-is-it-silencing-speech/)

Here are links to the show on various podcast services,

* [Apple podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-shadow-moderation-how-is-it-silencing-speech/id837690450?i=1000577256568)
* [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5mgSWLlYIkSzyYVPAifVrA)
* [PodBean](https://wholewhale.podbean.com/e/what-is-shadow-moderation-how-is-it-silencing-speech/)
* [Stitcher](https://www.stitcher.com/show/using-the-whole-whale/episode/what-is-shadow-moderation-how-is-it-silencing-speech-206082737)

Let me know what you think, and please pass it around. Thank you!

I'm on a podcast talking about shadow moderation. Check it out!