Automated Censorship
What to Do If You Think You’ve Been Shadowbanned on Instagram
How to appeal, check violations, and more
Tomas Apodaca
Journalism Engineer • he/him
Tomas Apodaca is a journalism engineer. He supports The Markup’s investigative journalism by exploring data, reverse-engineering algorithms, and creating custom tools.
Before joining The Markup, Tomas worked at Nava PBC and Code for America, building software that helped people access and navigate government services. Before that, he helped build digital maps in Mongolia, collected data for an elections API in Indonesia, and worked against HIV/AIDS in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Signal: apodaca.01
Automated Censorship
Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram
An investigation by The Markup found that the platform demoted images of the Israel–Hamas war, deleted captions without warning, and denied users the option to appeal
Show Your WorkAutomated Censorship
How We Investigated Shadowbanning on Instagram
We found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, suppressed hashtags, and limited users’ ability to appeal moderation decisions
Gentle January
Fake Your Answers to Security Questions
Why share any personal information if you don’t have to?
Gentle January
Unlock Your Phone Without Using Your Face or Fingerprint
Authenticating with a passcode or pattern protects your data legally as well as physically
Machine Learning
Plagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy
The tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time
Year in Review
The Stories that Made Us Jealous in 2023
A look at 10 articles we wish we had published this year
News
The Problems Biden’s AI Order Must Address
The Markup gives a section-by-section breakdown of the summarized executive order on artificial intelligence
Page 2 of 2