My scholarship was silenced by an algorithm. What now?

by Dr Vu Tran-Thanh

For many scholars, including myself, social media platforms like Facebook have become essential tools to “bring research out of the ivory tower”. They enable us to reach the general public and foster a spirit of research for the common good.

However, I recently learned a difficult lesson: this approach can be easily undermined, with a platform’s own community standards weaponised against the very academic debate it claims to protect.

This article is my personal account. I am an education researcher nearing the end of my doctoral studies at Durham University in the United Kingdom. As a transnational academic, I maintain strong connections with my home country, Vietnam, by building professional communities and sharing academic knowledge with practising teachers.

As part of this effort, I frequently share academic content on my Facebook account – my own research, discussions of relevant studies, and critiques of educational issues.

The context is Vietnam’s foreign language education sector, a rapidly expanding and lucrative market. To attract students, many private language schools promote what they call ‘unique language learning methods’ – which are often more of a marketing device than a genuine scholarly innovation. It was a post on this topic that led to my account’s removal.

In one post, I commented on a newspaper article in which a teacher from a well-known language school promoted their method while criticising the supposed lack of systematic teaching in Vietnam. Believing the claim was neither academically sound nor intended for educational purposes but rather for marketing ones, I called it questionable.

A few hours later, my post, along with others containing the word ‘IELTS’ (the International English Language Testing System), was reported for violating intellectual property rights. The reporting agent was listed as ‘the University of Cambridge’, though the claim was linked to a domain registered in India, strongly suggesting the profile was a fraudulent impersonation. Soon after, my account was disabled. My appeals to Facebook have had no effect.

A system that is open to abuse

My experience serves as a stark example of how academic debate can be shut down by the weaponisation of a non-human content control system – and it happened with alarming ease. In this case, I believe the fake identity of a real brand was used, and Facebook’s unsophisticated system appeared to identify a violation where there was only legitimate academic discourse.

When this happened, it made me reflect on how easily academic voices can be silenced the moment they raise concerns about pseudoscience being used as a marketing strategy. This is not a new problem.

Businesses have always invented ‘scientific stories’ for their products, and while those who practise real science have been persistent, they have often been ignored or silenced.

It is an unfair game. On one side, science is often kept in the ivory tower, where ‘impact’ is measured by h-indexes instead of lives improved or generations educated. On the other side, those who attempt to bring knowledge to the public are forced onto for-profit social media platforms which lack the necessary infrastructure to protect them.

An unequal fight for resources

The issue can be reduced to a simple question: Who is more resourceful? Who has the power and means to create tools that can easily exploit the weak security systems of platforms like Facebook?

A malicious actor can silence a critic with a minimal investment of time and money. The victim, meanwhile, is left confronting a faceless, automated system that is not designed for nuance, context or fairness. While I doubt Facebook has ever taken its responsibility for freedom of speech seriously, the fact that its weak system allows fraudulent claims to suppress legitimate debate is concerning. It becomes a passive agent of censorship.

This experience has forced me to ask a fundamental question of my peers and university leaders: What is the future of public scholarship? We are all encouraged to engage, to have impact and to connect with the community. But if we are doing so on platforms where our work can be erased overnight by a fraudulent complaint, are we not building our houses on sand?

We urgently need a conversation about creating and supporting platforms where the public and scholars can discuss knowledge in a practical and, most importantly, secure manner. Without this, the call to leave the ivory tower is simply an invitation into a digital wilderness where the loudest or wealthiest voice prevails, not the most truthful one.