I feel like the TikTok ban is only the start.
The US is pissed that it couldn't 100% control the narrative on Israel genociding Palestine and sees the internet as the reason why. They've already put a lot of effort into homogenising and controlling the narrative on most big social media sites. I wouldn't be surprised if they started cracking down more under the guise of "stopping misinformation"
The nature of censorship could take on a whole new forum given the tools available. Shadowbanning gives the user the illusion that they are still engaging with the community, without alerting them to the reality that they are not. The net effect is the average user never noticing, and ultimately never trying to circumvent or appeal, a ban. One clue, however, is the lack of engagement with the user. I could see places like Reddit or Twitter creating systems within their shadowban functionality that also create shadow-engagement in an attempt to dispel any notion that their posts or comments are never seen by anyone.
Yeah, it's doable. Weaponized dead internet where you get a trickle of ChatGPT posts.
I am somewhat suspicious of how prevelant shadowbanning is as I almost always hear the term being used by aggrieved right wing people who think they're not getting the engagement they deserve. but it'd also be very hard to evaluate, wouldn't it?
I mean you can verify you're shadowbanned. Open your comment in a private tab and see if it's there.
I agree on being suspicious of shadowbans as well. However, Automoderator has the ability to effectively shadowban someone from a given subreddit. You configure it to automatically use the "filter" action triggered by a poster of a given username. "filter is a unique action to AutoModerator, and will remove the post but keep it in the modqueue and unmoderated pages." Works on both posts and comments. So it might be more prevalent then we think.