[sangnoir]

> So the net effect is that secretive censorship hurts genuine individuals the most.

From first principles, the moderators would not consider shadow-banned individuals as 'genuine'.

Since you brought up the subject of spammers - whats your take on email spam transparency, and the use of spam folders? should MTAs (like GMail or Exchange server), in the interest of transparency, immediately reject messages categorized as spam rather than accepting and quietly placing them in the spam folder, never to be read by a human? This would absolutely solve the problem where emails from genuine users end up being blackholed in the spam folder.

[rhaksw]

Good question. No, I wouldn't support that. The current system works and there is still transparency. One of the two people in the conversation has a chance to review the content.

It may be that inboxes are different from public or open-ended conversations. What often happens in the moderation of public conversations on social media is that neither person is aware that any removal or demotion occurred. So, even the user(s) whose content was not removed does not have a chance to rescue the content from spam.