In Which Leonard Processes His Feelings

Note: This article is the second in a four-part series on my Quora experience having my account deleted, and some reflections on how social media should or should not moderate and spread certain content. The posts are:

1. What made Quora change its mind?, about what might have led to my account deletion.
2. What silencing feels like. (This post, about my own journey having had my writing removed.)
3. The impact of speech for pedophiles, on how limits on our speech impacts us and society. (In progress.)
4. Lessons for discourse, on how we should think about speech and the obligation or not) to share it. (In progress.)

If you haven’t read the first post, I highly recommend doing so before this one.

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One of the most common complaints you’ll see online is that people feel they’ve been silenced.

Silencing might refer to being ignored, or being shouted down. Maybe it’s people being banned by social media, or fact checked, or canceled. This debate, about the right of your speech to reach others, is all over social media and our political discourse. (Look at “fake news,” or the “Twitter files,” or “cancel culture” as just a few examples.)

I have very complicated reactions to these complaints. On the one hand, I believe strongly in free speech, and I think institutions should generally support the free exchange of ideas, including ideas they object to. On the other hand, many of the people being “silenced” were powerful people who were not really being silenced at all. Others had actually done pretty bad things. It seemed like we always focused on how the powerful and odious were silenced over the weaker and marginalized. Moreover, too often, the complaints sounded like a playground fight: “well, their side got to do X, but when I did it, I was banned!” Like asking who shoved who first.

And then it happened to me.

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If you’ve been reading, you know that Quora deleted my account.

No one could claim that a social media platform deleting discussions of pedophilia is surprising. Of course it would get reported. Of course it would get banned, even if I never violated Quora’s written policies. Look, I hate praising my own work, especially in a post like this where it can feel so defensive, but I truly believe my posts presented an important and nuanced approach to pedophilia. That was no protection.

I always knew this was a possibility, and I thought I’d be sad, but not hurt. “It’s the cost of doing business,” after all. But when it happened, it hit me harder than I thought it would.

I’m not talking “life altering misery.” But did I spend an entire evening (when I’d had other plans!) complaining to friends and drafting a blog post? Yes, I did. Did I spend the next day distracted from work? Yup. Even now, there’s a lingering hurt and anger: the kind of anger that comes when you’re saying something important, and someone else just tells you to shut up.

My inquiry into my own feelings gave me insight into not just my experience, but those of other people who wade into controversy. This post is going to be me, well, venting at you. It’s a post about my emotions, and it’s pretty raw. But it also sheds some real light on the personal impact this kind of experience can have, and the impact of a ban.

OK, so why do I feel bad?

I wish my posts were still up on Quora. I wish I still had my view counter. I wish people could still find my writing.

But do you know what I wish most of all? I want to grab the Quora moderator and shake them by the shoulders until they finally give me a good explanation of why it happened after six years with no issues. My brain wants to shout out:

How could you do this to me? I’m not like those other writers…

I’m not the kind of person who gets told their speech is worthless!

Anyway.

It looks like no matter how much I try to be the “mature adult,” I took this personally. I was rejected. But maybe I should take a step back, and try to understand where these feelings come from.

I lost a lot of hard work, and it feels like a judgement on me

I mean, this one’s pretty obvious. I put in more than six years of work building up over 140 answers. They’d gotten a lot of views (over a million). People had written to me with how I’d helped them.

Now no one can see them. If you go to the Quora page for my answers, it tells you that my account has been banned, which makes it all feel small and unimportant, like I was just some troll on the internet. My answers still show up on a Google search, but anyone who goes there will just have it confirmed: “oh, this was a bad person.”

Maybe I wasn’t doing as good a job as I thought I was

I guess I should say that when I was on Quora, I prided myself on being the adult in the room. The reasonable person who would say, “I understand your perspective, but have you considered…?” The pedophile who could talk to non-pedophiles and convince them, “y’know what, we’re people and most of us aren’t trying to hurt anyone.” I loved getting comments from people who said they’d never considered my perspective before. I loved the sense that I was actually bringing people together and making progress on communicating across lines of division.

Maybe one reason I feel sad is that this image of myself got punctured a little bit.

I was probably reported by a coordinated group of people who decided to “take down” a pedo. If enough people all report something, then it gets escalated within the moderation team. It’s often easier for social media platforms to just delete things rather than actually evaluate them against policies. Now, internet mobs are not exactly known for their reflective consideration of different viewpoints, but still I wonder… did the people who reported me actually read my posts? Were they truly offended by them? Was I just… not as persuasive and reasonable as I thought I was?

What percentage of people who read my posts still hated me after? Was it more like 10%, or more like 50% or more? I knew some people would still hate me no matter what I said; but they had to hate me and decide my even speaking was unacceptable. Enough people had to hate me that much, even after reading what I said.

Not, “I disagree with you.” Not “I hate you.” But “I think you shouldn’t even be allowed to say this.” Or “You are making this space unsafe.” Or something… something that means that I’m not supposed to say what I think. I’m not supposed to try to build understanding, because that’s how toxic I am.

I’m “talking to the hand”

What effect does being banned on Quora really have? After all, I can still post on this blog. I could make a website somewhere saying whatever I wanted. My speech is not limited; it’s just… others’ ability to hear me.

After all, how could anyone find out about my writing? You can’t post about this on Twitter. Few people would post about this using their real name on Facebook or LinkedIn, and fewer still would make videos with their likeness on YouTube or TikTok. It seems unlikely the news media would write anything about this. Sites get popularity in Google because of links to them; who would risk linking to my blog? Quora was actually a way of getting the word out, where an algorithm would recommend me and people could read in private.

Without Quora, how does anyone find this? On Quora, I got 5000 views per week. On this blog, that’s about what I get in a year.

Moreover, Quora is ranked highly on Google searches. I always imagine the 13-year-old kid, just realizing their attractions and looking for help. If they don’t find me… just who do you think they’re going to find? Do you really think the person they’re likely to stumble across online is better?

However, it’s not just the people trying to understand themselves whom I wanted to reach. Of course I wanted to reach people who wanted to look for information on pedophiles: people struggling with their own attractions, or people who discovered that a loved one had this attraction, or people who were just curious. But I also wanted to reach people who weren’t looking for this information. The people where Quora, through its algorithm, decided they might be interested. In other words, because I was a popular writer on Quora, I could start discussions and broaden perspectives with people who never would’ve given a second thought to pedophilia.

So yes, by banning me from Quora, I wasn’t stopped from talking. But others were stopped from even knowing that I’m speaking.

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Let’s bring out the S-word: “silenced.”

I’d heard the term before, and sure, it sounded bad, but the honest truth is that I never internalized it. I never processed what it really meant, or how it really feels, until it happened to me.

I have things to say. Things that will be helpful, useful, important. Things that will inform the discussion and genuinely add value. I wish I could describe the frustration I feel, but the best I can do is by analogy. The child who throws a tantrum when they’re not being listened to. The frustration you feel when it’s clear your spouse isn’t actually listening to what you describe.

Photo by Saif71.com on Unsplash

You know the impotent little guy talking to the big burly guy, who holds out his hand, and is like, “talk to the hand, bub.” Imagine how angry it must make someone to be treated like that.

This is like that, but the silencing is systematic. The “hand” doesn’t even belong to a single person; it’s the guardians of the internet.

To be silenced is a statement about your worth, and the worth of your ideas. It’s being prevented from even getting your thoughts out. It’s not that I failed to persuade people: is that I’m not even allowed to try anymore. I didn’t lose the game; I was kicked off the field.

It feels irrational to be as upset, but watching my own reaction helps me understand all the other groups that are marginalized and censored and silenced. This experience explains to me why there’s so much emotional conflict, so much “Sturm und Drang” on the internet.

I was censored

If I had insulted anyone, or called anyone a name, or done anything to dehumanize another person, I could understand this a lot better.

This was explained recently in a post by Scott Alexander about the difference between moderation and censorship. In short, moderation is about behavior and how you conduct yourself; censorship is about content and what you say. You moderate someone for calling someone else a jerk; you censor someone for justifying terrorism or spreading misinformation.

Of course those lines blur. Someone might be polite while they state a belief (“gay sex goes against God’s will”) that creates an unsafe space for others. In fact, an argument I am sympathetic to is that the mere discussion of pedophilia might have created an unsafe space for readers, although given how clearly labeled the questions were (I never wrote an answer on a question that was not explicitly about pedophilia) I don’t really buy this as a reason for deleting my account.

Censorship can be justified, I think. Alex Jones claiming that Sandy Hook was a conspiracy and no kids were killed… well, shutting him down was censorship, but it was justified.

I don’t want to litigate the question of moderation versus censorship here; that’s probably for the next post in this series. My point is just this: I think I was censored, not moderated. It was my ideas, not my conduct, that led to my removal. I never insulted anyone, acted unkindly, or even wrote in all caps. I certainly never used a slur.

So yes, social media companies ban Nazis for their content. The claim must be that my content was as bad as that; that it was so grossly misinformative, or otherwise poisonous to society, that it had to be removed.

When people talk about being silenced, it can come for lots of reasons. I have little sympathy for those that are silenced because of their behavior. I find the way we dehumanize each other online to be absolutely repulsive, and even if I’m pretty progressive with my views, I can’t get behind someone who calls every Republican a Nazi any more than I can get behind the slurs people use on the right.

But silencing because of content, not tone? There, you had better have a very good reason, and I don’t think Quora did.

The best argument for banning me

I’ve spent some time trying to think about the best argument for censoring my writing.

As best as I can tell, it’s this. Creating a space where pedophilia can be discussed positively creates a hard to moderate environment where bad actors can spread truly harmful ideology. Allow people to speak positive of pedophilia, and some people will inevitably argue positively for sex between children and adults. That boundary is hard to moderate; someone who’s not steeped in the topic might have difficulty telling one argument from another. As a result, you will let in discussion that is genuinely harmful to society, where giving it a big stage will hurt kids. It is safer to just ban all positive discussion of pedophilia.

Do I agree with this? Well, no. I think it’s not actually that hard to distinguish between content that promotes child abuse and that which doesn’t. I think the same slippery slope arguments can be made about many critical areas for debate. I think it suppresses discussing genuine scientific research. I also think it’s just inconsistent: platforms clearly allow lots of harmful and toxic speech to thrive.

Moreover, the harms outweigh the benefits. Put aside the benefits of greater societal understanding of nonoffending pedophiles: the people who will be harmed by not being able to learn about themselves will suffer a lot.

That said, I want to acknowledge the argument. It’s not right, but it’s not nothing, either.

So… silencing?

I can remind you of many of the reasons what happened to me matters: that what I wrote helped people, that it provided needed information, that it supported a robust and critical discussion. I talked to journalists; I talked to researchers; and I talked with lots, and lots, and lots of people who were struggling with their attractions. I helped them, and I pointed them to good resources, and I helped them to stop viewing child pornography or to control their thoughts and fantasies.

The First Amendment provides no guarantee of my ability to speak on Quora, nor should it. Quora is a private company with the right to decide what messages to spread. Besides, I’m guaranteed the right to say what I want, but not to force people to listen, or companies to share it out.

This isn’t about what the law says. But my experience reminds me that if we want a healthy internet, we need moderators who can moderate in the right way, and in the smart way. I’m a pretty stable and happy person; my emotional state from all this can best be summarized as “a bit irked.” I’ve gone from an intellectual “okay, banning makes you feel devalued” to understanding more viscerally what it’s like when it’s not just one person, but an entire community that says “talk to the hand.” No wonder people get so mad. No wonder the temperature gets so hot.

It forces me to be honest that there are harms no matter what choices we make about moderation and the power of social media companies. Each moderation action makes people angry and upset.

So how do we find a balance? How do we navigate between “everything is allowed” and “keeping people safe,” especially when the topic is pedophilia, for crying out loud?

That’s a topic for my next post.

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I’ll be honest. I have written and rewritten this post (that’s part of why it took me so long to post), but it still lacks coherence. I mean, my own thoughts and feelings also lack coherence. After all that editing, I think I just have to accept it. If you want to know how I feel when I let my emotions out, this is it.

I still don’t know what really happened. I don’t know why people reported me, or even if that was what happened. I still wonder, on some level, if I failed at my effort to persuade people. But clearly I was making a difference. I didn’t try and fail; I was prevented from trying.

There’s no easy way to summarize these feelings, but I will, for one moment, actually use profanity in this blog. It feels really shitty.

I just wish I knew why it happened.