Visibility Filtering

meet the new censorship

Admittedly this is another post that strays from the Seeds mission. But I think the following foray into the terrain of quasi-Orwellian info machinations is merited, given that censorship shapes reality in pervasive and insidious ways.

Soon enough, I hope, we can get back to the more nourishing topics that are this Stack’s raison d’être.

The occasion tonight is that I just learned the name for the kind of censorship I’ve experienced on social media over the past 3+ years: “visibility filtering.”

As one of the filtered, I have no way of knowing for sure what combination of words triggered some algorithm to limit my posts’ reach, or whether my Facebook account was actually flagged by a living human as a source of misinformation (or “malinformation”).

What happened was this: quite early in the pandemic, I noticed that my posts were suddenly reaching very few people—perhaps a tenth or less of what they would reach previously—and this in the early stage of lockdowns, when folks were on the computer more or less constantly. When post after post gets a mere one or two ‘likes’ and no comments, you eventually catch on: it’s not that you’ve stopped striking a chord or interesting people with what you’ve got to say, it’s that your mic has been turned off.

It would of course have been much more honest of the company to simply ban me outright. For them to cut my reach to a tiny fraction of itself is the information equivalent of an employer cutting your pay to 10% and thus forcing you to quit, instead of having the decency to fire you. Probably, kicking me off would have violated the terms of use or left Facebook somehow vulnerable, whereas simply lowering my reach could easily be blamed on standardized policies or an algorithm. (I’m far from an expert on free speech, media, info tech, or any of the fields that intersect around this issue).

I can, however, take a wild guess as to what got my reach limited: mentioning words like “Covid” and “pandemic” in the same sentence as phrases like “East Asian Medicine” or “acupuncture.”

Mind you, I wasn’t making grandiose claims in these posts. Mostly I was relaying traditional Asian medical perspectives on treating infectious diseases in general. I was pointing out that these approaches can be efficacious when skillfully administered, and that though this virus may be new, Asian medicine has been dealing with new viruses for a very long time, with quite a good track record on the whole.

I was arguing against certain knee-jerk assumptions such as one-size-fits-all protocols. (Spitting in the wind, I know.) I was posting in response to other herbalists, whose thinking wrongly, in my opinion, focused on finding the right “anti-viral herbs,” when to my mind this was just applying the same old reductionist thinking to the botanical realm.

Then, as the pandemic continued and I got some clinical Covid-19 experience under my belt, I wrote from that experience. By and large it has born out the statements above, affirming that Asian medicine and methods are in fact useful for this thing, because they don’t treat the thing (i.e. the virus), but treat people with the virus.

This is not earth-shattering stuff. From my perspective, it’s common sense—but it is rather an unconventional point of view if you’re standing squarely in the rationalist-materialist mainstream. It could even qualify as “malinformation” to those who demand double-blind research studies to back up every statement that touches on health—never mind that funding is conspicuously lacking for studies that would legitimate a medicine as democratic as, say, moxibustion. You can’t patent mugwort, so can’t make ten figures off it. Nor can you standardize a medicine that’s as much art as science. Yet by the tautological logic of this particular species of double-think, because Asian Medicine is too complex to fit neatly into the linear research paradigm, it must be unworthy.

This one gets me, folks. The whole dynamic between new-school and old-school medicine reminds me of a clever and arrogant teenager who doesn’t understand grandpa’s hard-won, gnarly and—yes, sometimes paradoxical—wisdom. Mired in toxic certainty, the kid dismisses gramps and his backward ways out of hand. But what if it’s the teen who’s holding the levers of power, and there’s next to no one to hold him to account even should he decide to gag and bind grandpa (who luckily knows kung fu and is not likely to take this kind of guff forever).

I should point out, I was not posting anti-vax or anti-mask screeds of any kind, though I have somewhat nuanced positions that don’t necessarily toe a party line on these topics. To the best of my recollection, I didn’t make a post mentioning the non-negligible adverse vaccine responses I have been privy to, either, though that would have been within my rights. (In retrospect, I regret not taking more of a stand around vaccines, not because I’m opposed to them—it’s complicated—but because I’m opposed to suppressing information.)

Still, what I did write was enough to get me flagged and effectively muzzled starting back in early 2020, and seemingly regardless of what I post since then, my reach has never really been restored.

Obviously, I’m not alone. Welcome to the new censorship. It’s one in which ostensibly open forums are silently policed, and users with unpopular ideas conveniently sidelined or even (in other cases) harassed and ostracized, such as by Twitter’s use of phony content warnings to discredit politically undesirable users seem by making them seem like pederasts. This is our reality now, and chances are you haven’t heard much about it, because the ones talking about it are (guess what) being visibility filtered.

Of course, censorship is always in the name of safety, or decency, or some other common cause we can all agree on..can’t we?

All together now: of course we can.