Don't Commit a Thought Crime. It's Against TOU

When I found out about Submit in February this year, one of the first questions people asked its founder was, “How can we be sure you aren't just another Elon Musk?” The answer? There would be a council, elected by the user base, who would hold the founder accountable. It sounded airtight, but the site became as transparent as a brick wall.

After a spate of racist bans, the founder admitted to racism and wrote a letter promising accountability for his actions. Then he promptly started timing people out for mentioning the racism he’d admitted to in cold, hard text. That’s when the site began timing Black members out for things like “weaponising their race”, “sharing information off-platform” and “assuming malicious intent” of leadership.

Think about the words in those quotation marks for a second. You can be temporarily kept out of your account for assuming that Submit’s founder and mods have malicious intentions. You needn’t do anything. Simply making the assumption is enough. All Submit members must think the best of their leaders or else.

The site is literally punishing people for thought crimes.

Last week, in a characteristic attack of hubris, Apollyon claimed Submit had an active membership of 80, 000 users. Members were skeptical, so they began following every account they could find to uncover a mysterious, unknown silo. They found only 3,000. Is this science? Nope. Is it revealing? Yep.

Last night, Submit issued four-month timeouts to most of those members for “inauthentic activity.” Want to know what inauthentic activity is? Me too. Maybe it’s another thought crime, or maybe it’s an attempt at obscurity because the site doesn’t want to admit it's ejected users for revealing the truth. Nobody who got banned knows what for. The reasons given are impenetrable, but all of them followed a few thousand people.

Remember that council I spoke of earlier? Well, last night, an applicant for council was given a four-month timeout. She won’t be on Submit for the evaluation process because she dared to question Apollyon. And if council applicants are removable during this important time, the council itself is undemocratic. Criticise leadership too much, and you can simply be removed without a transparent reason.

When people complain about the fact that Apollyon is timing people out for criticising him, his favourite response is, “I only gave you a timeout. Baku would have banned you.” And sure, Baku has apparently banned people for criticism in the past, but he lets the majority of his critics remain on Fetlife. I’ve been a thorn in John Baku’s side ever since I joined Fetlife. I’ve written extremely critical posts of this site’s policies and actions, and it took seven years to get a shadow ban for it. Seven years.

And in the end, Baku apologised and reinstated my ability to trend.

Over in North Korea—I mean Submit—you get four months for attempting to verify the founder’s claims. If you post a racist image of a shit-flinging gorilla, though, you’ll get a one-day time-out... unless you’re accusing the site of racism, in which case you’ll get weeks or months.

Over time, the site’s priorities have become clear: Council doesn’t matter. Democracy doesn’t matter. Accountability and transparency don’t matter. Diversity doesn’t matter either. We learned this last month when 99% of its Black and BIPOC users were timed out or banned. We learned this last week when mods issued a timeout to someone on the spectrum for requesting a less ableist moderation strategy.

If you’re still reserving your judgement at this late stage, think about that council that was designed to protect you. I will probably get a perma ban from Submit for this post. It will probably get written up in their famous "transparency" channel. Just as well because I just committed a thought crime.