Usually when people say they were censored for simply “speaking out”, what actually happened is that they went on an unhinged racist rant written in all caps with several slurs thrown in.
If there were any that weren’t, how would you know? There was no trial, no way to introduce evidence (or vet it), nothing is transparent.
You could simply dismiss those people as racists, and continue to believe what you’ve always believed.
Here’s a likely scenario. Someone’s been on reddit for 4 years or 9 years, and they’re just “not a good person”. Sure they’d have friends in real life, but they’re sort of an asshole. And they’ve used the word “removed”, definitely in real life, and almost certainly on reddit (if only to recount what someone else said to them, but not directed at them). Then they make a good argument for politics/religion/whatever that someone else doesn’t agree with (it is, after all, occasionally possible to make good arguments for disagreeable things). Someone trolls through their comment history, finds the comment with the magic word, reports it.
Two strikes, and they’re out. Sure, maybe if they come back from the suspension immediately and delete their entire comment history (all 4 or 9 years of it), they can take the warning and continue. Though, they’ll almost certainly get another report before they could even finish if they somehow knew to do that (9 years at an average of 50 comments per week is tens of thousands).
But the person who found the two gotchas is sitting there waiting, he didn’t just find one to report. He’s holding one back.
Reddit has a link to “appeal” a ban afterward. It’s unclear if a human sees it. But if they do see it, they’re not spending more than 5 minutes on it. Their review could be anything. Or nothing. They provide no ruling, not even some short statement.
And finally, let’s just take a look at the posted claim. Are we really supposed to believe that there aren’t either any Chinese internet propagandists or enthusiastic Chinese citizen volunteer propagandists who would report someone to reddit for statements much like in the screenshot? It’s possible his other comment was calling them “slant-eyed removed” or something like that, but that’d be a pretty hard 180 considering the wording of the screenshotted comment.
what are you even talking about bro
