This Aged Well. Apparently Too Well for r/ILTrees.

This Aged Well. Apparently Too Well for r/ILTrees.

Sometimes F’nAround stories begin with months of research, thousands of pages of public records, lawsuits, regulators, government agencies and complicated questions about institutional accountability.

This one began because I thought something from two years ago was funny.

Which, frankly, is much more on brand.

We Never Forget. Unfortunately.

This morning I was going through some old posts when I came across something I hadn’t thought about in a while: an old press release I posted on Reddit involving Juan Finch Jr. and nuEra Cannabis.

I remembered it immediately because I had been questioned about it thoroughly by Robert Minetz.

I remember lots of things.

It’s occasionally useful.

Occasionally terrifying.

And apparently very inconvenient for anyone hoping the internet develops amnesia.

The original post concerned allegations Juan was publicly making about nuEra and Illinois’ cannabis social-equity licensing mess. Those statements eventually became part of litigation in which defamation claims were pursued against Juan and me.

Years passed.

Lawyers lawyered.

Depositions happened.

Thousands of pages accumulated.

Seven days of trial happened.

Twelve jurors happened.

And ultimately, the jury returned verdicts in our favor on the defamation-related counterclaims.

That’s not how a defense verdict in a defamation case works.

It makes finding the old post pretty damn funny.

Because there it was.

Sitting exactly where I’d left it.

So naturally, I reposted it with perhaps the most mature commentary available after years of litigation:

“Well, this aged wonderfully.”

And Then We F’nAround

I posted it to the F’nAround subreddit.

But then I had another idea.

There is an Illinois cannabis subreddit called r/ILTrees.

If you’re going to revisit a two-year-old story about one of Illinois’ cannabis companies after the litigation surrounding those statements has actually gone to a jury, where better to put it than a community dedicated to discussing Illinois cannabis?

So I posted essentially the same thing there.

Same Reddit.

Same account.

Same old post.

Same basic caption.

For approximately five minutes, this was the entirety of our groundbreaking investigative journalism.

Let’s make a joke.

Then Reddit made it interesting.

The F’nAround version was there.

Approved.

The ILTrees version?

“Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters.”

Huh.

That’s when the morning’s scheduled programming was canceled.

Wait. What?

At first I assumed Reddit didn’t like the link.

That’s boring.

Reddit filters things. Spam filters exist. Computers make decisions. Somewhere inside a server farm, an algorithm decides you’re selling counterfeit Viagra because you used a semicolon incorrectly.

Fine.

Except there was a small problem with that explanation.

I checked the other post.

Same material.

Still there.

So apparently Reddit could display it.

It just couldn’t display it there.

Now we’re F’nAround.

To be very clear, we don’t presently know why.

Maybe r/ILTrees has an automated filter that caught it.

Maybe Reddit’s spam systems treat different communities differently.

Maybe there is a domain rule.

Maybe there is a keyword rule.

Maybe a moderator did something.

Maybe Reddit’s algorithm woke up this morning, smoked too much Illinois cannabis and decided litigation wasn’t the vibe.

We don’t know.

And unlike some corners of the internet, we’re not going to turn “we don’t know” into “therefore our favorite conspiracy theory is confirmed.”

But we do know what happened on our screens:

One community displayed it.

One community didn’t.

And that becomes particularly amusing because of some history.

Oh Right. The Cole Memo. Thecolememo.com

More than two years ago, podcaster Cole Preston, who operates The Cole Memo, interviewed Juan about the controversy.

During that process, my recollection is that Cole made clear he had contacts with people associated with nuEra and intended to contact them regarding Juan’s claims.

Fair enough.

That’s exactly what a journalist or podcaster should do.

Get the other side.

The strange part came afterward.

Juan’s interview never came out.

Cole later addressed the situation in an episode involving someone else, but the original Juan interview remained unreleased.

I’ve wondered about that ever since.

I have my own opinions about what might have happened. Other people online have made their own allegations about relationships between cannabis media, companies and moderation.

But opinions aren’t evidence.

I cannot tell you nuEra asked anyone to suppress anything.

I cannot tell you a cannabis company caused today’s Reddit post to disappear.

And I certainly cannot tell you that somebody is secretly sitting inside a smoke-filled moderator command center smashing a giant red DELETE JOE button every time F’nAround appears.

Although that would be an incredible office.

What makes the history relevant is something much simpler.

Cole is also associated with moderation of the Illinois cannabis Reddit community.

So when a two-year-old story involving Juan and nuEra suddenly couldn’t make it through that community’s filters, while the same material remained visible elsewhere on Reddit?

Yeah.

We noticed.

We rarely forget.

Remember the beginning?

This Isn’t Actually a Free-Speech Case.

Before somebody puts on a powdered wig and starts yelling about the First Amendment, no.

This isn’t that.

Reddit is a private platform. Subreddits have moderation rules. Moderators can moderate things. Communities aren’t constitutionally required to publish whatever F’nAround feels like posting before breakfast.

The interesting question is different.

Online communities increasingly function as information hubs.

People join an Illinois cannabis subreddit because they presumably want to discuss the Illinois cannabis industry.

Companies.

Products.

Regulations.

Licenses.

Executives.

Controversies.

Government.

Litigation.

All of it.

But what happens when invisible filtering mechanisms determine which parts of that industry’s history actually reach the community?

More importantly:

Who controls those mechanisms?

Because there’s a meaningful difference between:

Reddit automatically thought this was spam.

and

This community has a rule that blocks this particular material.

and

A human being decided this particular discussion shouldn’t appear.

Those are three very different stories.

Right now, we don’t know which story this is.

So we’re going to ask.

This Is How F’nAround Becomes an Investigation.

This is probably the funniest part.

We weren’t investigating r/ILTrees.

We weren’t investigating Reddit.

We weren’t investigating cannabis media.

I was literally screwing around making a joke.

That’s it.

I saw a post connected to litigation that had since gone all the way through a jury trial and thought:

Holy shit. This aged well.

Then I reposted it.

Then one copy disappeared.

And unfortunately for everyone involved, unexplained inconsistencies are basically catnip around here.

So now we have questions.

Was the submission removed automatically by Reddit?

Did an r/ILTrees-specific filter catch it?

What triggered the filter?

Was it the domain?

Was it a word?

Was it the underlying subject?

Was there a manual moderation action?

Are similar posts treated the same way?

And perhaps most importantly, can the moderators simply explain what happened?

Maybe they can.

Maybe this whole investigation lasts eleven minutes.

That would actually be wonderful.

Please Let the Answer Be Boring

There is a tendency on the internet to treat every unexplained event as proof of whatever somebody already believed.

We’re trying not to do that.

The screenshots don’t prove a cannabis company controls r/ILTrees.

They don’t prove anyone was protecting nuEra.

They don’t establish why Juan’s interview wasn’t released years ago.

And they don’t establish that today’s removal was intentional.

They establish something much smaller:

We posted materially the same historical content in two Reddit communities and got two different outcomes.

That’s enough for a question.

Not a conclusion.

And after everything we’ve learned over the past few years, we’ve become surprisingly fond of questions.

Because sometimes the answer really is boring.

Sometimes it’s an automated filter.

Sometimes it’s a technical setting.

Sometimes somebody clicks the wrong button.

And sometimes you ask a seemingly insignificant question and accidentally spend the next several years reading depositions, filing public-records requests, studying regulatory systems and sitting through a seven-day jury trial.

We’ve had mixed experiences with that.

So we’ll eventually ask r/ILTrees what happened.

We’ll look at the moderation rules.

We’ll test whether the link itself is actually the problem.

We’ll document whatever happens next.

And if there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, we’ll publish that explanation.

But until then, we’re left with one wonderfully F’nAround question:

If the same information can appear on Reddit but can’t appear inside the Reddit community specifically dedicated to the industry it’s about, who decided you shouldn’t see it?

Maybe Reddit.

Maybe a filter.

Maybe a moderator.

Maybe something completely mundane.

We don’t know.

Yet.

All I wanted to do was make a joke about a two-year-old post.

Well, this aged wonderfully.

Apparently the joke is still aging.