The Internet Is Being Sanitized and Controlled: What You’re Not Seeing

Jul 10

Written By Michele Edington (formerly Michele Gargiulo)

The internet was supposed to be a great equalizer, a grand place where ideas could rise or fall on their own merit, where citizen journalists could stand shoulder to shoulder with legacy outlets, and where voices on the margins could finally be heard.

Yeah…okay.

The open field is closing and it has been for a while now. Shockingly, the gatekeepers aren’t even the governments anymore. They’re algorithms and the people who write them. These silent, unseen, and unquestioned moderators are out there, suppressing what it believes needs to be suppressed and boosting what it thinks should be boosted.

We still scroll like it’s a free-for-all, doom-scrolling until our minds are mush and our hands develop carpel tunnel, but what we see (and more importantly, what we don’t) is being curated with surgical precision. The internet is being sanitized for profit, controlled for narrative, and filtered for emotional charge.

This is no longer the information superhighway, it’s just a theme park ride, nice and pre-packaged, padded for safety.

Shadowbanning: The Ghost at the Controls

You won’t get a notification to the top right corner of your screen or receive an email, and there’s no official list of it either. Yet, one day, your posts just…stop being seen.

Shadowbanning is the digital equivalent of being erased while still speaking. You shout, and your voice echoes only back to you.
The algorithm has tucked your content under the digital rug, and not even necessarily because it was violent or obscene, but because it didn’t fit the vibe.

A post that questions a mainstream narrative, a sentence that contains a “sensitive” word, or a comment flagged by AI as “borderline” are all fair game in this shadowy world. It doesn’t even take a policy change, or a human decision (eeek), it just takes a line of code….and suddenly, you're completely invisible.

This isn’t censorship in the traditional sense, it’s quieter and more polite than truly being censored. You’re not being punished…you’re just omitted. I’m not sure which is worse to be honest, because omission, in the age of attention, is annihilation.

My husband, Zakary Edington, is one of those who got shadowbanned early on. His socials won’t grow despite daily posts and exceptional content. As a bodybuilder and Pro Wrestler, his physique alone should be generating followers, but as I write this today, his account has just under 400 followers after around a decade of posting.

The Algorithm Is Not Neutral.

We treat the algorithm like a natural force that just happens to everyone, like the weather. Yeah, but the thing is, it’s not. It was made, and it was made to serve someone.

Social media platforms don’t care to show you what’s most truthful, they show you what will keep you scrolling.

The more inflammatory, the better. How Rage Bait Became the Internet’s Favorite Drug. The more divisive, the better, the more emotionally agitating, the better. You get the point right? If someone can keep you emotionally involved, they can keep you on their platform longer.

What you’re seeing isn’t “what’s happening,” it’s what will engage your lizard brain and what won’t get the advertisers nervous. The algorithm is optimized for a very specific kind of experience: high-arousal, low-nuance, and brand-safe.

That means entire categories of content are subtly deprioritized. Anything that’s long-formed and nuanced, critical thinking, non-polarizing discussions, or even low-key honesty that doesn’t incite strong emotions are pushed to the back. You’re allowed to post whatever you want…it’s just that no one will see it.

Yeah, the truth is that some content should be moderated. Violence, hate speech, doxxing, child exploitation, etc etc, the list goes on and one, these are not what this conversation is about. I’m talking about what happens when moderation creeps into narrative control. When users question war efforts and are flagged as “foreign disinformation”, or independent journalists cover corruption and are “throttled” for spreading “misinformation.” Real life medical professionals with dissenting data were deplatformed during COVID-19. Why?

It wasn’t because what they’re saying is provably false, but because it’s totally inconvenient to the current narrative. If it goes “against community guidelines” that shift like fog, it’ll be stomped down and kept in it’s place. Moderation, once a tool to protect users, is now a mechanism to shape what is.

The Google Filter Bubble

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with Google so take what I say here with a grain of salt. I spent an entire year blogging for 3+ hours a day and only took five days off in an entire year and then when their core update rolled out it throttled my traffic from 300 people per day down to 50. After an entire year of work. So, remember why I’m bitter when I go into a monologue about it.

What do you do when you want to know something? You Google it.

Even all these search results have been filtered for “quality” though, and guess who decides what quality is? Yup. You guessed it. Good old Google. They’re the ones with the keys to the park or the invitations to give out to those of us (like me) who just want an equal spot at the table.

In the early days, PageRank was a beautiful thing. It prioritized relevance and peer-based authority, but over time, the algorithm has become opaque and heavily weighted toward big outlets, ad spenders, and partner content. Try searching for: natural cancer therapies, government overreach cases, negative effects of a common pharmaceutical, controversial environmental practices by major corporations, or dozens of other hot-topic items that the world is gatekeeping.

You’ll find sanitized summaries, PR pieces, or a bunch of literal fluff that has no meaning whatsoever behind it. You’re not going to find the grassroots or the forum stories with miracle cures or the side effects you weren’t warned about before you took your drugs. You won’t find the whistleblower posts of someone on the inside who truly saw what was going on and is trying to spread awareness.

No. Instead you’ll find what’s been curated for you; polished, packaged, and approved.

If you’re not beautiful, brief, and brandable, good luck getting seen. I’m serious, and I’m sorry if I just struck a nerve. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok favor “safe” virality: dances, trends, light drama, and inoffensive education. Try getting traction for something raw, something long, or something hard to package in 7 seconds.

Try telling the truth without a hook, or talking about grief, or corruption, or nuance without dancing. These platforms reward performance over substance and engagement over integrity.

Even creators who want to do more thoughtful work are forced to “game the system” by watering it down or trying to make it funny.
The other option is to not be seen at all.

YouTube is where truth once went to hide in plain sight with all the documentaries, confessions, and exposés. Now, however, entire channels vanish and videos with millions of views are removed retroactively. New monetization rules discourage anything remotely controversial. If your content is critical of government, pharma, war, finance, or tech…you’re playing with fire. Also no, there’s no appeal process with teeth. All you can expect is polite emails from “Team YouTube” and demonetization at scale.

The internet used to be a conversation too, but now it’s simply a broadcast. Comment sections are disappearing across major news outlets. “To preserve civility” was the reasoning I could find after looking deep into the thralls of the interwebs about it. The truth is though, it’s just to preserve control.

Without comments, there’s no way to challenge an article’s framing and no room to share firsthand experience. No pushback, no collective memory, no resistance, it’s all vanished in favor of the one narrative being shoved down your throat. Even Reddit, once the wild west of discussion, has begun tightening its grip. Threads get locked, mods delete posts without explanation, and users get banned for “brigading” when they dare to ask tough questions.

When the only thing allowed is applause, what you have is a stage, not a community.

The Illusion of Choice

You follow 300 people, but you see posts from 30. You like thoughtful, nuanced accounts, but the algorithm keeps feeding you outrage and clickbait. You search for independent science, but only the sponsors come up first and you’ve got to scroll to page 20 on Google to find what you’re actually looking for. This isn’t accidental, it’s just engineered to be this way.

Our feeds are not reflections of the internet, they’re prisons of perception. I hope you’re all enjoying your padded walls and digital blinders. The illusion is that you’re choosing, but the truth is: you’re being chosen for.

When we only see what keeps us scrolling we become fractured and misinformed. We lose the ability to think outside the frame, because the frame is all we’ll ever see. The internet was once a kaleidoscope, but now it’s a spotlight, aimed at whatever sells.

Truth doesn’t trend.

What Can You Do?

Curate your own feeds carefully. Follow thoughtful people, independent outlets, look and watch real humans with messy opinions. If someone is arrogant enough not to change their mind about something no matter how many facts are put in front of their faces, just do yourself a favor and stop watching them.

Bookmark sources directly and don’t rely on Google to surface what matters anymore. Keep your own archive and repost what speaks to you on Pinterest. I do this all the time and can’t recommend it enough.

Support decentralized platforms as much as you really can. Consider tools that resist central control, like Mastodon, Nostr, this blog, or federated blogging.

Use alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, or even Reddit as a search filter can often yield more real results.

Comment, share what you find that speaks to you, and talk about it. Actually discuss things that you’re passionate or excited about instead of letting silence win. Engage with someone even if it’s to just reach out and say “thanks for writing this article, it meant a lot to me to find it”. Even if it’s less visible, it still matters, and people need that connection to another person more than they might know.

Do yourself a favor and also disconnect regularly. The most radical act might be logging off and going to walk barefoot in your garden. Go reclaim your attention from others out there who are trying to steal your time. Remembering the world exists outside the scroll.

We aren’t doomed to scroll in silence and we’re not helpless in the face of curation. There is still space for you to make choices that can impact your digital life experience online. There’s genuinely still some wildness on the interwebs, if you know where to look.

We just have to stop mistaking the feed for the truth and stop letting our worldview be written by invisible hands. If the internet is the new public square, then we have to learn to reclaim it before the only voices left are the ones the algorithm allows.

Deplatforming isn’t always limited to one app either, say something controversial on YouTube, and suddenly your TikTok account gets flagged. Get removed from Twitter, and find yourself shadowbanned on Instagram, or even apply for monetization, and watch a cascade of denials unfold across platforms.

They call it “industry standards,” but what it really is is coordination.

Private companies, all acting independently, but somehow with the same definitions of truth. They have the same partners and the same censors with no meaningful way to appeal. This isn’t a conspiracy, it was built without your vote.

When Fact-Checkers Become Thought Police

The idea was noble: fight misinformation with truth, but somewhere along the line, "fact-checking" became preemptive obedience.

Articles are labeled false before the ink is dry sometimes. I’ve now had 6 different Pinterest pins “removed” for spreading false information about cutting edge science I shared. Complex debates are reduced to yes/no binaries, when the entire world really is just a shade of gray. Entire subjects are declared "settled" by people with a vested interest in the outcome these days.

Science is supposed to be a method, not a brand. Politics are protected, and anyone who contests them is thrown into the fire. The passion that people talk about politics with makes me actually sick to my stomach these days. I don’t even truly believe any of us knows what’s really going on in the world, but we just think we do. It makes me cringe harder when people are positive they’re the right one and are standing on morally high ground even though they don’t know the full story.

These fact-checkers are no longer referees either, they’re players in the game. Funded by the very entities they’re supposed to scrutinize and partners with the platforms they’re policing.

What began as a public service has become a velvet rope around the truth keeping nuance out and letting only the loyal in.

Growing Up in a Filtered World

There’s an entire generation that doesn’t remember the internet before algorithms. They’ve never seen a raw feed or read an uncurated comment section. Most of us can’t even remember what it’s like to search and received all the results.

The sense of truth has always been filtered through engagement metrics for a lot of people under the age of 30, and their understanding of the world is a highlight reel of whatever the algorithm thinks they’ll watch longest. Curiosity is trained out of them, because everything important has already been selected for them.

We used to say children were sponges, but now they’re just a bunch of funnels…directed, measured, and optimized.

When they look up from their phones and ask “why didn’t I know about this?” It’s because they haven’t been shown anything to conflict with their world view.

You don’t need to ban someone to make them go silent, you just have to make it financially impossible to speak. Remove their monetization or cancel their sponsorships then shadowban their store links. Suddenly, their content doesn’t reach and their income dries up. Their voice, though technically allowed, becomes unsustainable. The reality is: this is control in real time.

Free speech without reach is a whisper in a thunderstorm, and if your livelihood depends on playing by invisible rules, you’ll stop saying anything that might cost you your survival.

That’s not free expression.
Where truth is demoted, nuance is filtered, and dissent is gently erased we’re living in a bubble. What you read isn’t random and whatever you see is not neutral.

As I mentioned earlier though, you’re not powerless, you can still build side doors and still write your own map. Remember that beyond the algorithm, there’s a whole wide world teeming with quiet brilliance. Go chase it, archive it, then speak it aloud. Allow your feed to be strange, and grow wildly human. Your mind should wander where no trending topic dares to go.

If we want a future with real freedom, then we have to demand a digital world that reflects the fullness of life experiences, not just what sells.

Even the messy parts, but especially the truth.