TL;DR what you see and post to /r/geopolitics is not what users see if you are on the /r/geopolitics shitlist

EDIT: one of the mods on /r/geopolitics replied to vatnik1024 post, “…moderators are encouraged to hide short comments that do not contribute much to the discussion…”. I encourage you to read the whole comment. Bottom line, this just serves to confirm the message of this post: if mods don’t like you or what you write, they shadowban your comments and you might not find out unless you dig around.

For sometime now, I’ve been a mod for /r/foreignaffairs which is a competitor to /r/geopolitics This wasn’t by choice but because I needed to read and understand viewpoints that are different from the usual echo chamber of Western corporate media. Specifically, I am interested in BRICS and the rise of the middle class in the developing economies. It turned out that non-Western media is often a superior source for covering these topics even if it is unsympathetic (or even occasionally hostile) towards the Western world and its values.

/r/geopolitics mods did not take kindly to my attempts to share these alternative media sources on the subreddit and banned my accounts when I was trying to promote discourse around the topics even though the articles were about geopolitics. This drove me to start spending more time promoting and supporting /r/foreignaffairs

Lately censorship (i don’t have a better word for it) on /r/geopolitics has gotten worse. Consider an innocous article about Putin’s ratings

The article got a resonable number of 59 upvotes. The top comment with 11 points is by noviy-login a moderator of /r/geopolitics But is that the top comment really? Let’s take a look at the account of vatnik1024 and his comment on the article below

Hmm…same number of points as the geopolitics mod. If we visit the article discussion page in incognito mode on the browser, does the comment appear anywhere on the page? No.

Notice that search for vatnik1024 matched only once on the entire page for a completely unrelated comment buried deep in the comments.

Bottom line, Putin’s trolls be damned, someone is shadow editing the conversations on your favorite subreddit and there is evidence to prove it.

Join /r/foreignaffairs and continue your conversations there without worrying about mods who want to squash your opinion and shape the opinions of others.