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I apparently got shadow banned almost a year ago from blahaj, for a comment I made on lemmy.world
(lemmy.sdf.org)
For the record I was posting in support of inclusive language, but pointing out that context and convention matter.
They seem to have even scrubbed my comment from their instance, lol.
The notion that his comment was "toxic" is objectively ludicrous.
Sorry, but they didn't call that comment toxic. Just that if an admin finds someone to be toxic, which is of course subjective, they can ban them.
In that case the word "toxic" should not have been used, especially in the way it was used "ban users who are toxic to their instance members" (emphasys mine) rather than "ban users who they think are toxic to their instance members", as the former implies that the OP is "toxic" rather than that specific Admin conclude (possibly all by themselves) the OP was toxic.
Even if "toxic" had been used in a way that conveyed the message that in this case a person's "toxicity" was the determination of an Admin (human opinion, rather than some kind of neutral process), I think one of the points that is being made is that for certain Admins, the barrier to ban is a lot lower than "toxic".
this kind of "Toxicity" is obviously subjective. Just because you don't agree, doesn't mean that their members don't and they don't in fact expect it of them.
Two points:
One Admin making such a determination is hardly a strict process like a Judicial one (is supposed to be) with a beyond reasonable doubt determination.
That the Op was banned for what he or she wrote elsewhere than in forums of that instance also, at least for me, given extra weight to the idea that the decision to ban was an arbitrary by a single person who has a very specific power rather based on very concrete criteria and validated by other people.
Absolutely that Admin is Technically Entitled to do what they did (it's their instance so they have that power), but that's a whole different thing from the action having been Ethically or Morally Correct. Mind you, I'm not even saying it wasn't, it might have been by chance, but the process that seems to have been followed - merely the opinion of a single human being who for technical reasons happens to have a certain power - is hardly something designed to maximize that chances of an Ethically and Morally correct result.
(Curiously, I would have found a vote by the members of the instance to be a perfectly acceptable and morally correct way of determining that they didn't want that person's presence in their instance, and in that case would have agreed with this last post of yours - though I still disagree that such process yield a beyond reasonable doubt assertion of the toxicity of the OP - but that doesn't seem to have been what happened here)