So, backstory. A while back, I got shadow-banned from Reddit due to me changing an /HFY flare in response to an auto-mod. I have been sending in appeals for almost two months now and nothing has changed.
Shadow-bans are a form of psychological warfare bordering on the whole Bewildering Punishment trope as they are applied without warning, notification or even in a way that allows people to realise that they have been made the subject of a ban. I only found out because I checked an older post of mine and found it to have been deleted.
Nevertheless, I grudgingly admit that Shadow-bans are legal and may have valid uses, but they need to be a carefully-considered targeted tool, not a algorithm-deployed barrage. As such, I have begun a petition to apply fines to those using Shadow-bans - this will not make them illegal, but if something costs a company money, it is examined very closely.
I have been somewhat inspired by William the Conqueror's accidental ending of the Slave Trade in England in the eleventh century - he needed money to pay his mercenaries and decided to skim off the top of the then-most profitable market in order to get the cash he needed. The market was the slave-trade, the skim was too big and he accidentally killed the market and set in place the foundations for the crusade against slavery several centuries later.
By suggesting something similar for Social Media Company shadow-bans, it is my hope that it will force them to actually pay attention to what their money-saving AI Algorithms are doing, thus making it so only those who are actively breaking the rules get banned.
Unearned shadow-bans are not the first thing that goes horribly right/wrong and causes issues. I direct people towards The Scunthorpe Problem as an example of badly-thought-out processes in computing.
If you live in the UK and wish the government to debate this issue, please help by signing this petition.
If you don't live in the UK but the subject concerns you, you may wish to contact your political representative about it.
Thank you for reading this.
