Quote:
Originally Posted by Lily&Me
Emphasis added by me.
It’s your qualifiers, IB, for lack of a better identifier, that imply this “shadow banning” is a problem here, if only you could and would speak to it. 
I had never heard of this before your post, most definitely not on this forum, and found it surprising that your post with these references was not removed.
The mods/administrators decided to handle it differently, and I have to say I agree with the end result.
Maggie |
= My boilerplate language, all forums.
= My standard disclaimer on the offer, all forums. I have to word it like that to emphasize that I personally am not accusing any mods of doing anything untoward. I'm just making an offer that I will track down a problem if anyone wants me to do that for them because they perceive that they have been treated unjustly. But I need proof.
It has happened several times that I've run into a previous poster and our e-conversation goes something like this:
Me: "Hey, good to hear from you - I don't see you on Air Forums much these days."
Them: "Yeah, I'm out. I got sick of being shadow banned. If it cannot be an authentic discourse, then there's no point in continuing."
Me: "Do you have proof? Screengrab? Email update of your post that was later deleted? If you can give me proof, I will run down the problem on your behalf."
Them: "I'm not interested. I don't want to dignify that forum with my participation, either directly or
in absentia."
And these are not trollers who are making these accusations. They tend to be more toward the James Damore end of the expressive spectrum.
And if it was just one allegation, I'd conclude maybe it was a technical glitch that cheesed them off. But it has been more than one, and of a similar pattern.
For those of you who are not familiar with shadow banning in the forum context, it allegedly happens on some forums in some instances at some times when content does not rise to the level of violating forum rules and thus cannot be legitimately deleted, but that content is not appreciated anyway, often because it does not meet some standard of ideological purity. So posts allegedly get quietly deleted with no explanation, in the hopes that the "offending" posters simply will not notice. But they do tend to notice.
The various Roadtrek venues were notorious for this practice, and we saw what happened to Roadtrek. There's a reason why multiple religious faiths declare lying to constitute a mortal sin (or its dogmatic equivalent) - a sin leading to death (and Roadtrek certainly died a bad death). Shadow banning is a particularly insidious form of lying.
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