Basically what the title says. I commented on a post and sent a link to my comment to my wife to get her take on the post and my response. To start, the link just takes her to the topic and not my comment. If she tries to find my comment it isn’t listed. If she manually goes to my profile and tracks down the comment all it says is “[Removed]”. However, from my perspective the comment is still live with 1 view and no activity. I’ve tried closing my browser, refreshing the page and everything and for me the comment is still visible even on the page for the post. For everybody else though it has been removed.
The crazy thing is the comment isn’t even controversial; somebody asked for marriage advice and I gave some. The “removal” seems to be automated too because I sent her the link basically as soon as I posted the comment and it was already shadow banned.
Kind of but no one really uses those words and you’d have to explain what you mean by them. Also, the distinction isn’t very important; the main thing is that this particular style of web moderation abuse was inflicted on someone, and using different terms for minor variations in the practice gives the people using it too much credit, especially when they aren’t above using all of them anyway.
You’re right that the part of the word that says ‘ban’ is potentially misleading if it’s used this way, but it still seems like the best option. To me the ideal term here would be something that clearly conveys a more expansive definition, but that also still conveys that it is something being inflicted on a person, as opposed to a more conciliatory verb that describes an action towards a piece of content.