This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006. Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the New…
How would this work for something like Twitter/X when accounting for individuals serving the US government? Someone could be flagged as a troll on the backend for unrelated reasons, but now their experience in communicating with someone in government is delayed. I understand that a delay is not the same thing as a block, but I wonder if the damage to the user’s experience is sufficiently similar for a federal judge.
The practice is fundamentally malicious because innocent people get caught in it all the time. The two main problems both stem from the fact that they don't admit to doing it.
The first is that you're posting interesting things but nobody ever sees it because you're shadow banned, and then what you should really do is create a new account and start over, but you don't know why nobody ever sees it. "Maybe you just don't have much of a following yet." But you never will with that account. An innocent person is subjected to the penalty meant for a spammer -- and suffers longer for it because they have no reason to expect they're being punished when they haven't done anything wrong.
The second is that even if you figure it out, they still don't admit to doing it, the consequence of which is that there is no appeals process. So if you have an account with a significant following and then get shadow banned illegitimately, you're much more likely to notice this because your engagement falls off a cliff, but there is no process for undoing it other than to abandon your account and start over from scratch.