Medium suspends account that investigates Chinese concentration camps (opens in new tab)

The author of this blog, Shawn Zhang, has been doing important work chronicling internment camps in Xinjiang using satellite imagery.

Here's an article about him: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ubc-student-us...

Hopefully his account suspension was because of orchestrated mass reporting triggering automatic systems, and his account will soon be restored. (A similar thing happened to many Chinese language Twitter accounts just before June 4, which is an important day on the Chinese political calendar.)

It seems odd that this process bans before investigation. It seems that a process that values value would want to not block content until it has been reviewed by some reliable machine or human system.

I like to try to figure out the principles of processes and systems and a process that blocks based on automatic flagging seems to me that it values preventing harm from people not liking something over preventing the harm of people not knowing from the info’s unavailability.

I didn't even know there were concentration camps in China. Thanks for sharing. If companies are going to shut out this sort of work in favor of free speech then we're headed for a dystopia.