> And the moderation being correct or not isn't the concern-- just the fundamental dishonesty of shadow banning. Exactly. The dishonesty is the part that bugs

> And the moderation being correct or not isn't the concern-- just the fundamental dishonesty of shadow banning. Exactly. The dishonesty is the part that bugs me. > (though, ironically, outright spammers might have an easier time making the legal argument because they'd be more able to show monetary damages). Right. For me, even if you could show that everyone had monetary damages, I'm not sure society comes out on top, because then there's also shadow demotion. How do you show that? Being the top item vs. the second item in a list makes a huge difference in terms of visitors. IMO we need to build systems that hold today's popular social media sites accountable on a regular basis. Accept that shadow moderation is part of today's systems and just start building tools that can counter it with information. If we need to build them ad-hoc once in awhile, or somehow be "on alert" for when the problem inevitably crops up again, I'm not sure that works as well as always having the problem somewhat at hand. In the free speech world there's the concept of Mill's "dead dogma", > However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth. [1] That's from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. > I am tremendously grateful for reveddit, and I think it's made a contribution to better the world. But I'm also not sure how far we can get with awareness. Even after all this time the whole subject can't even come up without people constantly repeating the false claim that subreddit mods can't shadow ban users (or their comments)! Haha, I consider such folks paid to say so. It makes no sense, right? Some of these messages get repeated over and over as if they're the covers on TPS reports. We're close to getting real publicity about it. I had an hour long conversation with a journalist a few months ago but I think they decided not to do the story. Regardless, people can see that transparency is needed, and they know that people are somehow becoming fanatics because of social media across all sorts of issues. They're nervous about showing their ideological opponents what gets removed, so they're not ready to take that step. We just need to help them see it's the right thing to do. Internet forums should be a little bit ugly like the real world. To the extent they're more pristine, you're just putting off that problem until the real world. We can "make the internet experimental again", or whatever. > But don't see anything better to do right now-- so education it is! Yeah! That's where I'm at. Happy to meet someone of the same mindset. Gotta catch some Zzz's now, thanks for your comments. [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm