On Mastodon censorship

A suspicious political unity for a decentralised social network

6 min readJul 17, 2023

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I was happy to go with the crowd and try out Mastodon, a federated open, source, non-centralised Twitter clone, which offered more space to post. I wanted to see what this decentralised system would look like, hoping it would lead to better and more intelligent conversations.
This was especially interesting to me, as I have been working on decentralised social networks for 20 years, starting with blogging and the Atom syntax and protocol, and even a little on some of the standards used by Mastodon, such as ActivityPub. Also, I am working on @Tim-Berners-Lee’s Solid Project, implementing a server and client libraries for it.

Nine months later, I feel let down. Arguably, Twitter does a better job of fostering open discussion, especially once they made space for longer Tweets allowing more subtle arguments to be developed. And people on Twitter are much more open to debating complex problems now. This is a significant change from when 240 char tweets forced everyone to speak in Tabloid headlines. Since Elon Musk took over and the blue identification reduced anonymity, the quality of the debate has risen, and it feels much less Trollish.

With Elon touting free speech absolutism, I decided to test it and push the limits a little.

Well, Twitter’s algorithm shadow-banned me thrice in the past 6 months for pushing its limits by exploring the philosophical angle of the trans debate. Note that I had never been shadow banned before, but that was probably because I only posted about mathematics and philosophy, as I never felt like saying anything very controversial other than questioning why children needed to be vaccinated for Covid19. (which did lead to some pretty harsh reactions at the time). Yet, even though I am very suspicious of centralised services, I still have my account on Twitter, and it is clear that free discussion there is doing much better than the Federated services that should have been there to protect us from dictatorial powers.

Mastodon is non-centralised in the sense of being architected around large nodes. I.e. it is Federated. People can run their personal nodes, too, though it is very resource intensive, I am told. (I may try it to understand how it works.)

So I got an account on the mathstodon.xyz node and was quite happy with it at first. But I started being a lot less happy when I found my posts being cancelled. Here are 3 cancelling events:

1. Cancelling a post about an MP being censored

The first one that got cancelled was my pointing to a story about YouTube cancelling a speech by @ABridgen in the United Kingdon House of Commons on Covid19. It is still available on Twitter:

If there is anything that should be beyond censorship, it is a speech of an MP in a parliament. Still, YouTube put the Speech back a day later, so deleting that Toot (Mastodon Tweet) was no longer that problematic to me.

I was warned, though.

2. Censoring talk on the dangers of sexual transition for minors

A few months later, I wrote a response to a Toot by Linus Torvalds, who gave his name to the Linux Operating System now running Android and all of Google services. In this Tweet, he mentioned how it should be ok for anyone to transition. Linus has no problems speaking openly and is well known for talking out without restraint on topics of interest to him. So, knowing he is strong enough to accept some feedback, I pointed out in a reply that there were problematic aspects of transitioning non-adults that should be noted, including top and bottom surgery (cutting off the breasts of young girls and the penis of boys), the fact that giving hormones to kids was not that well supported by medicine and the whole project had been cancelled in 4 European countries recently — none other than those that started the trans movement (Holland, Sweden, UK, …) Yet, that message was immediately censored by the admins of my instance (not by Linus). I promised I would not talk about #Trans issues anymore. Someone else would take up that fight.

3. Censoring Robert Kennedy Jr’s discussion on bioweapons

Then this weekend, it turned out they were unhappy about my Tweeting about Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. too, after his statements on the danger of bioweapons were taken out of context and distorted to make him look like an antisemite.

The RFKJr tag on the https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/RFKJr contained no Toots in his defence, so I decided to write a few of those up. First, let us remind people what RFK said:

We need to talk about bioweapons. …. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are — because of the genetic structure, the genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE-2 receptors — COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. That’s what all of those labs in the Ukraine are about. They are collecting Russian DNA so that we can target people by race.

I also pointed to a blog post by Peter McCullough who carefully linked to the paper Kennedy had referred to and 500 more on the topic

Media Twists RFK's Remark at NY Press Event

Big pounce on candidate's talk about COVID-19 susceptibility variation.

petermcculloughmd.substack.com

I also pointed to the talk he RFKJr the same day with Rabbi Shmuley, who praised his position on Israel and his friendship with the Jewish people (while also being clear that he disagreed with Kennedy’s position on Vaccines — people can disagree!)

But it looks like smearing a Democratic presidential candidate is ok for the mathstodon.xyz admins. The problem is that making false anti-semitism charges prepares the way for real anti-semitism, as it devalues the word.

So they removed the posts where I rectified the record but left all the others that continued smearing RFKJr!

My advice to the Kennedy 24 team, if anyone can get hold of them, is to build a little network of supporters across all those instances so that there is always someone who can put in a word for him.

4. The strange coherence across Mastodon instances

Now is it only mathstodon.xyz doing the censoring? No, it is consistent across other instances. Here are the RFKJr tags for other major instances (which I got from this list of mastodon servers)

As you can see, even the W3C Social instance does not show ANY story that puts Robert Kennedy Jr’s point of view forward, where it is straightforward to do so. My Toots were the only ones up for a while that did this.

How can someone who gets over 20% of the Democratic vote not have anyone to defend his position on a decentralised social network — other than me, a European? Should a decentralised network not be a lot more anarchic? How come it is only defending the status quo? Mastodon is either dead, or the federated nature of it is allowing the admins of the large instances to set the tone by censoring their local instances and forcing others to censor if they want to belong to the federation.

This suggests that the instances have found a game-theoretic way to pressure one another to cancel anything critical of the current Democratic establishment status quo. (which is an entirely crazy status quo by historical standards). The game needs to be analysed technically to understand how that works. But it gives too much power to the instance admins and forces them to all make the same decisions.

Just for fun. Another message that they deleted completely before even booting me from their instance was a copy of this one I posted to Mastodon:

5. Some confirmation from Jack Dorsey

I don’t know why Jack Dorsey puts quotations around the word “decentralisation” when he speaks of it concerning Mastodon. But I guess it we have found a point of agreement here.

I should look at https://nostr.com/. I wonder if Jack Dorsey has looked at Solid, which I am working on.

Here is my nostr key
npub1m0wym3srryqtkt9uuev43arglv4083p9redzep85ayurv53xsmas9nn0rv

I posted a defence of RFKJr on #nostr, and at least it is still there, but there is not a lot of activity
https://nostr.band/note1ehkwr7260yu62maxruhcjtyjmkp3dprnpgaynlv5uvjjg4lqylhscz47kr

Update: I have moved to w3c.social. So there is one tweet now linking to this blog post defending RFKJr.