Shadowbanning seems a bit fraudulent as well: advertisers are led to believe there's a particular level and type of engagement on the platform, but it's at least partly false.

I'm in favor of anything that makes advertisers waste money, since their entire endeavor is evil.

I'd have thought that if you were shadowbanning enough people for that to make a difference, then your platform already has worse problems.

Shadowbans are a very useful tool against human-powered disruptive activity (sockpuppetry and what-not), because they shift the effort asymmetry to favour the attacker a bit less than it tends to do otherwise. (Given the possibility of being shadowbanned, the attacker has to either constantly check that the fruits of their labour are still accessible, or risk wasting work posting into the void on an account that has already been null-routed)

That this technology, when available, invariably winds up being used against good-faith users seems to be the usual grubby-fingers problem where the powerful take away from the commons of social trust for a temporary advantage, akin to police using COVID contact tracing data to chase small-time drug dealers.

I face this issue regularly on Reddit. I've noticed two things:

1. Sometimes it is accidental and some automated filter does this.

2. Sometimes it is done by a mod who didn't like what you posted, and shadowbans the post instead of deleting it. The hope is that you don't find out about this because otherwise you may enquire about the decision, and other mods will get involved in discussing it and over-rule the previous decision.

On Reddit only the admins can shadowban, not the mods.

By admin, I assume you mean mods who have "full permissions" right? Some of the popular subreddits do have have a lot mods with such rights.

Im pretty sure only paid janitors aka "anti evil operations" can shadowban. Mods with full permissions are still just mods.

Admins are employees of the Reddit company. Moderators typically are not.

Shadowbanning is lying, plain and simple. I don't doubt that it works. Lying often works.

[Oct 2020]

I wish this site would be less heavy handed when it comes to shadow banning. It seems like a significant number of comments ends up getting shadow banned and I find it both frustrating and a bit insulting. Compared to here, Reddit is an oasis of free speech.

I had an account for YEARS here. One day I was shadow banned because I accidentally responded to the wrong comment, it was just out of context, and boom. Found out a f’n year later when some nice person told me I was banned. I spent so much time and effort “helping” people for nothing during that year. I don’t help anymore as that was a d** move. I’ll probably be banned again for this comment.

I had a similar thing happen to me, not here but on Reddit. Was shadowbanned for no reason (never learned what it was) on an account where i treated everybody with respect. I created a new account, but from that day on i started behaving like shit on the website. I knew accounts were worth nothing if they could get randomly shadowbanned so I started acting like so.