by Harpo1988
Most people aren’t aware of horrible the censorship on Reddit is. They think it’s just about banning subreddits that go against the narrative. Far more insidious are all the comments that get deleted without most people knowing about it. But by using sites such as Unddit or Removeddit we were able to see just how many comments are getting removed and what they said.
On average it’s between 35%-45% of the comments on the major subreddits. And almost none of the comments that get removed are in violation of any written rules. They only challenge the narrative. Unfortunately as of 2 days ago Reddit banned the ability for those sites to retrieve deleted comments. This is a huge blow.
On May 1st, Reddit banned Pushshift from the Reddit API. Since Unddit relies on Pushshift to find removed and deleted comments and posts, any posts made after this time will appear to have zero comments on Unddit. The official announcement is available here
Someone posted a comment and deleted it while I was replying so here’s the comment I wrote my response to
What difference does it make? Do you seriously think those subs were going to restore the deleted comments, even if they had the theoretic ability to do so?
No. But it was very eye opening for people to see just how brutal the censorship is. It discredited Reddit and it demonstrated just how anti free speech this place really is. It was great to be able to show people that all the comments they see aren’t actually how people think but how Reddit wants you think. It’s crazy how a thread could have 1000 comments but 400 of them have been removed by the mods and very few if any actually violated the rules.
