[shadowgovt]

Different frameworks of ethics disagree on whether lying is always unethical. Shadowbanning-as-lying can be seen as feeding misinformation to a hostile actor in an attempt to impede them. In that sense, it's no more unethical than someone demanding the combination to a safe so they can rob it and a person responding with a false combination.

> As for shadowbanning being a key tool in managing a community - In HN's case, I imagine any shadowbanning system could be easily defeated, as a malicious actor could create a new account for every comment.

New accounts have no history and no score, so they fit into the community in a (justifiably) low-reputation place. While you can do that, you'll have an army of "greentext" accounts and the community tends to downsample their opinions.