Media Action Center is a group of of concerned residents throughout the U.S. led by former Emmy-winning broadcaster turned media reformer Sue Wilson. We have successfully influenced policy at the Federal Communications Commission and at local TV and Radio stations throughout the country for more than a decade to ensure We the People are truly served by the publicly owned airwaves. (See the archive of our work under "older posts.") We successfully forced Entercom to give up its $13.5 million license to KDND for killing a woman in a radio water drinking stunt. We have a long-running action to label Alex Jones' radio show as the fiction it is, which has taken Jones' program off dozens of radio stations nationwide. We educated the Supreme Court in FCC v Prometheus Radio on critical information to #SaveLocalNews.

Please see MAC's 2018 Comment to the FCC (below) to learn why these actions are crucial to Democracy. Find full journalistic coverage of the Supreme Court case and our Amicus brief, Sinclair Broadcasting's shell game, Alex Jones, the Strange v Entercom trial and other public interest media issues at SueWilsonReports.com. For background on how we arrived in this era of disinformation and what to do about it, see Wilson's 2009 documentary Broadcast Blues.

FTC Request for Public Comments Regarding Technology Platform Censorship

May 21, 2025

 In the Matter of:

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION

Request for Public Comments Regarding Technology Platform Censorship

Docket number FTC-2025-0023

Good FTC Commissioners,

Am I being shadow banned on the social media platform X? Maybe. Let’s examine the evidence.

First, I am not a social media influencer. I currently have 2,069 followers on X, roughly the same as I had on Twitter for years. While it was Twitter, I enjoyed many exchanges with others, and often had my posts retweeted. I mainly post about issues of media policy and disinformation, and my point of view differs from that of current X owner Elon Musk. But having lived through fire evacuations, I also post an evacuation checklist whenever a major fire breaks out. Those posts gained the most traction.

Since Twitter became X, the personal exchanges went away, and I get very few retweets, even when asking whether people can see my posts. Is it shadowbanning? Perhaps it’s just their new algorithm. How would I know? I only know that the eyeballs on my evacuation checklist posts used to be high but have dwindled down to very few.

Please see my posts from July 2022 compared to similar posts I have been making in recent days:

JULY 2022:

MAY 2025:


 

As the Commissioners can see, the number of public views on these similar posts changed dramatically after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Does that mean X is shadow banning my posts?

I can just say I see posts from many people on X complaining about just that.

 

Thank you for taking up this critically important issue.

 

Sincerely,

 

Sue Wilson

Media Action Center