Silenced By Medium On Medium Day
Dear Organizer, WTF?
From the moment I learned of it, I was stoked about this gathering. The first ever Medium Day. Yay!
Writing has long been dormant for me, which I’ll delve into another time, in another place. Since I made a commitment to myself to publish regularly on Medium, I was delighted to participate in this member-driven, community unconference event.
I found value in the morning sessions I attended, including CEO Tony Stubblebine’s keynote address. I really appreciated what he had to say about the direction Medium is heading, and I liked his responses to questions I thought could be a bit tricky to handle. All was good when he signed off. I grabbed something to eat. Things went sideways after lunch.
My gut was telling me that I’d be better off elsewhere, but my brain wanted to know what the next speaker had to say about a topic that, like it or not, impacts all of us. So I joined Dr. Tom Frieden’s 1:30 p.m. stage presentation entitled “Staying Safe and Healthy Before, During, and After Pandemics and Other Emergencies.”
Out of the gate, the talk bugged me, but, honestly, I don’t believe it was just about having divergent ideas. I mean, in light of the topic, I was expecting an informed perspective from tough lessons learned, but the content seemed stale, pre-packaged. It didn’t come across as enlightening at all, or even particularly thoughtful in my view. At the same time, the presentation felt patronizing to me.
I found myself more active in the chat than I’d been all morning. I typed about feeling like I was in a junior high school assembly, which, granted, isn’t nice but legitimately captured my experience at the moment. That certainly couldn’t be grounds for stopping me from posting. Could it?
My problem was Dr. Tom didn’t strike me as saying things of substance. He told us that government should do a better job of ensuring public health but offered nothing regarding how to make that happen. He got fired up about the importance of medications and reducing salt intake and exercise. At some point, he slipped in the phrase “raining Covid” before going on to champion mask-wearing in public the moment we feel sick, which had me wondering if my browser had been compromised by some disturbing Faucian time-warp while I was out to lunch. It sounded like 2021 again.
There’s plenty of evidence debunking the mask mantra, I piped into the chat. A little later, in the Q&A, I posted: How can we help people reduce their meds and begin taking charge of their own health? When I tried to post that question into the chat, I wasn’t able to. I clicked into the chat box again and got this message: You have been muted by the organizer. What?
I clicked again. Got the same message. I clicked back into the Q&A tab. I couldn’t post there any longer either. Not only was I locked out of engaging for the rest of the session, I could not participate in any other sessions after that. To be clear, I could attend sessions but couldn’t make comments. There were no emails from Medium nor notifications within the app informing me why this was happening. By 2 p.m., I had been silenced.
The plug was pulled and I didn’t have the power to change a thing. It bothers me that at no point did I get a heads-up about edging close to some arbitrary, invisible line that, once crossed, would result in muzzling. Why? How does the organizer determine what and where that line is, let alone when it’s been crossed? What triggered muting me without warning and leaving me trying to scroll and click my way out of UX purgatory for the remainder of Medium Day?
I’m mad, mostly, and a bit disheartened. As I mentioned, I’ve recently committed to engaging with this community and had begun to feel belonging that I’m now somewhat questioning. It sucks, really. I was enjoying this space. I believed Medium had room for my opinions, my take on things, my concerns, and my contributions. I was slowly cultivating connection with writers whose work I embrace and had genuinely begun to feel welcomed here. I want to believe there’s still room for me.
I don’t believe what I posted warranted reprimand or censorship of any kind. Just reach out to me. DM me. After all, we’re here to connect with our words. That’s what brings us together. Tell me how I’ve impacted you. What made you so uneasy, organizer person? You had better be a person…
I have not read any of his work on Medium or elsewhere and did not know the first thing about Dr. Tom Frieden until I got silenced during his Medium Day presentation. I was shocked but not surprised to find out that, according to Wikipedia, he was a medical officer for the WHO, New York City’s Health Commissioner, and Director of the CDC for nearly a decade prior to his current initiative as President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives — a nonprofit established to prevent cardiovascular disease and epidemics.
He shared a soundbite during the talk about a global initiative stemming from Prevent Epidemics, one of the nonprofit’s projects. They have developed a well-connected, very well-marketed early disease detection and rapid response program that’s gaining all kinds of traction worldwide with Dr. Tom Frieden leading the way. The initiative is called 7–1–7, a numeric for 7 days to detect outbreaks, 1 day to notify public health, and 7 days to have all control measures in place.
It’s those final seven days that frighten me. Their undefined guardrails. Each in our own way, we’ve lived under control measures delivered as something we should put our faith into, but, given the past 3.5 years, I have my concerns.
Being the accomplished professional he is, I can’t imagine Dr. Tom being upset by what I had to say to the point of muting me or discreetly directing someone else to shut me up while he was presenting. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. This guy must have experienced a lot worse commentary during his career both in-person and online, which brings me to these questions. Who is the Medium Day organizer responsible for:
- Deciding that I should be prevented from posting
- Muting me during Dr. Tom Frieden’s afternoon stage presentation
- Preventing me from participating in subsequent sessions
- Uploading replays of Medium Day presentations
I’m sure it wasn’t an accident. So what was the rationale behind muting me? Did the organizer act alone? Was there some sort of directive? Could it be possible that the sensitivity bar is so fragile or the rules so mutable that I deserved to be censored? If so, I need to know. Don’t you want to know?
Needless to say, I was eager to see the replay. I thought somehow it might provide clues to help me clarify what happened and why. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch it. For some unknown reason, out of all the Medium Day presentation replays available, I could not find “Staying Safe and Healthy Before, During, and After Pandemics and Other Emergencies” no matter how hard I looked.
There is no replay of Dr. Tom’s talk. Crazy, eh?
— DT
