I find "throttling" or "shadow banning" to be far more objectionable than simply banning / removing comments.

At least if my post is deleted I can tell. But when companies artificially limit the reach of content they do not like, you might never know.

Facebook openly admits to doing this. They are playing god by curating which information is worthy / unworthy of being seen, as well as presenting a warped view of reality to their users.

I'm not talking about deleted comments, I'm talking about shadow deleted comments. The only way (without external tools, I guess) to know it's happened to you is to notice a suspicious lack of engagement with something you posted, then visit the same thread in a private window and see that your comment isn't there. If you look on the account that posted it, you will still see it.

You may not even have been aware that the above is a thing; most people aren't. But in my experience it accounts for a large fraction, if not the majority, of moderation actions against real human users on Reddit.

Shadowbanning is very similar but IMO less insidious since it's a lot easier for human users to notice. I'm not sure if per-subreddit shadowbans are a thing, but I lean toward no because it has not happened to me (that I'm aware of).

Shadowbanning is at least not something that is available to normal moderators on reddit. You could set up AutoModerator to remove all posts by a user but they will be visibly removed.

Reddit as a whole does have shadowbans but at least as far as it is public knowledge that functionality is restricted to the admins. Perhaps moderators of large "default" subreddits get special tools though or perhaps they can call up the admins to do it for them.

> You could set up AutoModerator to remove all posts by a user but they will be visibly removed.

Is shadow comment deletion not available to AutoModerator? My own experience suggests otherwise, though not conclusively.

For forget you can get preemptively banned from many subs simply by posting in a “wrong think” sub the mods don’t like.

Granted you can just create a new account to route around it but still…

For a good laugh, drop a comment in /r/ChurchOfCovid and watch the auto-bans roll in for a few hours

I'll give reddit some credit for leaving that subreddit unbanned. It's good to be aware of what kind of misinformation is being spread around;.

I won't. They banned every other sub along the same vane. This one only gets by because they pretend the whole thing is satire. Read the comments

You might want to rethink your approval of spreading misinformation

You can't fight something you aren't allowed to see. Better to have your evil out in the open you so you know what it is, and where it's spreading.

Blinding yourself to the things that harm us doesn't make them go away, it only leaves you more vulnerable.

Yup. The biggest tip off that our response to Covid is basically a scam is the fact that you are absolutely not allowed to think anything beyond what “the experts” say. And not just any “expert” either, only ones that fall inline and spread doom and gloom.

God damn I still cannot get over how many people continue to buy into this Covid nonsense.