At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you’re interested, I can start doing that again.

Would you?

My understanding is that downvotes reflect whether or not someone agrees with a post or comment much more than whether the user is making a constructive comment or not so they can only be used to infer how agreeable the comment is.

I’ve also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they’re being ranked down, which almost always is because they’re being a jerk about their “dissenting” opinion, and not the opinion itself.

Use me as an example, I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.

So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?

You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.

You wanna know how credible any media is? Look at the receipts.

Where did they stand on Libya? Iraq? Afghanistan? Kosovo/Yugoslavia? Iraq the first time? Panama?

If the closest thing to criticism they did when it mattered was “maybe it could be done more competently”, they’re only free in the sense that they’re publishing what the state department wants for free.