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One thing to note is that mods can shadowban people from flagging. You can still hit the flag button but it doesn't get counted. (I'm pretty sure this happened to me at some point.)

It would not surprise me one bit if more left-leaning users got shadowbanned from flagging than right-leaning ones.

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So you’re proposing user flagging intent may by evenly divided, but the bias could entirely be the mods inhibiting the left-leaning flaggers disproportionately? Is there evidence of the flag shadow ban mechanism/biased application or is that mainly suspicion?

Yes. And I’m not saying the mods are secret right-wingers who are trying to shape the discourse, but I am saying that their implicit biases may come into play when they decide who to flagshadowban. (And also which articles to manually remove flags from: anecdotally, this seems to happen more frequently with right-aligned topics.)

This site desperately needs a public moderation log.

You can’t even vouch for an article the way you can for comments.

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