I'm on day one of my third temp 7-day sitewide reddit ban this past year. Before that, I was a daily participator on reddit for over 10 years with no site-wide actions.
I thought it might be fun to share the story of my bans. Feel free to share yours.
The first one was for summarizing Bill Maher's views on fat women, old women, and transgendered people. This was understandably determined to be hate speech by the AI, but was upheld by human appeal.
The second one, I don't even remember clearly. I think I may have been criticizing Zionism on somewhere, probably a popular news subreddit. One thing you have to keep in mind is they delete the offending comment and so you have to guess at what your offense might be; then you only have 250 characters to defend yourself. The ban was done by AI. About five days after my seven-day ban ended, I got the notification: Your ban has been overturned. Thanks!
The third one just happened, so it's fresh in my memory. I wanted to talk about something I found crazy on one of my favorite TV shows: a black woman, mother of two black children and wife of a black man, who was in her 30s living the United States had her FIRST social justice epiphany--and it was about press freedoms in Guatamela. The post was shadowbanned. I commented on another thread, warning a user that the mods would come along soon to shadowban any comments on race. Both our comments were shadowbanned, and thereafter, I was perma-shadowbanned on that sub--any comment I made was immediately sent to the shadow realm.
I looked for discussion about the show's treatment of race (which would be interesting since the show did not--as the subreddit does--ignore the issue entirely) and found nothing more recent than 14 years ago. The sub had been wiped clean of any discussion of race on the show.
I wrote the mods and asked them to either
a) lift my shadow ban
or
b) ban me permanently.
To make things easier for them, I also called them racist cowards. An hour later, I received my temp ban for bullying and harrassment.
My appeal simply laid out the facts: they objectively demonstrated both cowardice (by shadowbanning) and racism (for shadowbanning discussion on race) therefore it is not bullying to call them racist cowards. Any conversation forum that shadowbans members for conversing is obviously lost, and then further sitewide bans them for complaining, is clearly lost.
