Reddit’s Moderation Log is a good benchmark for Popular Censorship. The Moderation log shows which articles have been removed from Reddit by either moderators’ actions or automated spam filters. It is a measure of popular censorship because the moderators who do the removals are all volunteers. Within the past half year, admission to becoming a moderator has become by invitation.
In addition to the moderators there is a spam filter and in the screenshot above, one can see that 4 of the censored articles were done by the Spam Filter and 3 by moderators. Curiously, NSA actions is one of the topics that gets the most censorship. But our choice for the most dubious censorhip is the NYTimes article about America’s Sinking Middle Class. Now this article had been posted to the World News category or subreddit.
Now the Worldnews subreddit states clearly – Worldnews is for major news from around the world except US-internal news / US politics. However if you scan the article it covers the story from a broad World perspective. And given worldwide phenomenon of greater Income and Wealth Inequality [China, Russia, Brazil, and India all have bad cases of great income Inequality] one would think the moderator would apply a little “moderation”.