Censorship is Alive and Well

I don't respond well to censorship. I've dealt with it a few times and even when it felt innocuous it was unpleasant and, strangely enough, hurtful. Here are my censorship stories.

I'd posted a note in a message board on the old America On Line forums. I think it was a stupid forum about a TV show or something meaningless, but a couple days later I got a note from a moderator saying that I'd used the phrase "BS" and that this was not acceptable. Personally, I don't find that phrase offensive, but I'm not the one that owned and ran that forum. I'd put effort into making that post and effectively it'd been wiped out. I would have had to repost the entire thing from scratch as I didn't have a copy of it. This kind of censorship is certainly less heady than the sort of censorship a journalist in Soviet Russia might have experienced, and really there's no harm done to the world because none of the subject matter was important. But on a personal level, it felt like rejection. 

My response to that was to simply not post there anymore. 

A similar thing just happened at Amazon. I'd written a review of a product that had been up for a month or two and had even gotten some positive votes from readers that found it useful. But suddenly that review was taken down and when I went to check on it there's a note that says something about "Amazon is no longer accepting reviews of this item from this account." Well that's weird since it was already previously approved and published. Did the product developer not like something I said in the review and ask Amazon to silence it? Did Amazon apply a machine AI scanner to look for key words that triggered it to shut down my review? Who knows?  And again, this is a review of one of billions of cheap Chinese products at Amazon, so it's ultimately not that important in the scheme of things. 

That's not what's scary, but the way it happened is concerning. When AOL removed my post, at least a moderator explained the reason. With Amazon, you get shut down with no explanation or opportunity for appeal. That's the scary part. When I went online to search for others that might have had this same thing happen to them, there are many testimonials from people that also had reviews taken down who tried to contact Amazon and have heard nothing back. 

I really liked Amazon reviews and did my part to write in hopes that I'd be helping people get a better idea of whether or not a product was right for them. But my response to this is the same as the one I had for AOL. I'm done if you're just going to arbitrarily censor without proper explanation or chance for appeal. Too bad, because product reviewers at Amazon are providing gobs of FREE content that can often help buyers.