Do we have any means to prevent disastrous red flag bullying?

Question

Today I was reminded of this again by a discussion on Meta Stack Overflow. The situation is following:

There is nowhere that a destroyed spam-flagged post will show up in the moderators' queue; it'll only show up in the lists of locked/deleted posts, etc.

(source)

Since we know this to be the case, that means that a post that gets destroyed by 6 spam or offensive flags in the vast majority of cases receives no further scrutiny, no further review and is left as deleted/locked.

But what happens if an innocent user is targeted by another malicious user who creates 6 accounts, and gains 15 rep on each so that they can flag?

Users that have multiple of their posts destroyed as abusive / spam face automatic IP blocks, and very quick question/answer bans. They also face -100 reputation every time it happens. That opens the floor to a terrifying (and near undetectable unless the victim contacts SE directly) abuse scenario:

• Normal user draws the ire of one determined user or a group of friends
• They decide to nuke a few of his new posts using spam flags
• The victim is now IP banned from posting on their SE site
• They also lost all of their reputation, so they can no longer post on meta (5 reputation privilege)

In this scenario, the only thing the victim can do is to notice that a few of his posts suddenly vanished (the reputation history does not show that deduction and the deleted posts are not listed anywhere) and use the "contact us" button and file a ticket. This requires the victim to have:

• Working knowledge of how deletions work on here
• Working knowledge of the -100 rep penalty and working knowledge that it doesn't show up in the reputation history
• Awareness of the "contact us" option

In order to even know just what the hell happened to them that they're now suddenly banned and lost all of their reputation.

In the volume of (legitimately spam/abusive) posts that are destroyed daily on Stack, the victim would be the only person who could ever realistically find this out.

This is not just limited to intentionally malicious abuse. It could easily happen if someone misclassifies something as spam and others pile on. Hell, it could have happened already somewhere sometime and we never found out about it. Again, it would be on the victim to have working knowledge of the intricacies of the site and how to correct their situation.

Do we have any tools to prevent this form of abuse effectively? Should we?

Answer 1

This isn't a theoretical possibility, it has been attempted three times on Stack Overflow in my time there. In each case, it was caught as it was happening and severe penalties were handed out. Still, a handful of times over a few years on a site the size of Stack Overflow is a pretty rare occurrence.

We do have the ability to quickly review posts destroyed using spam or offensive flags via the deleted:1 locked:1 search option, which I often use to clean up after spammers and trolls. This gives us some visibility for community-flagged posts.

We can clear these flags after the fact in cases of abuse, invalidating the votes and penalties imposed by them, so it's not too late to correct this when caught afterward. Again, all such cases I've encountered were caught before enough flags allowed for auto-deletion.

Still, I really would like for community-deleted posts and comments to be shown to moderators in an easily reviewable fashion. I think the best approach would be an auto-flag on community-deleted spam or offensive posts, because that would put these right in front of us and not force us to remember to run a query or visit a dedicated link each day. It would also allow us to delete spam or troll accounts easily.

This kind of abuse can also happen around comments, and there we have had comments deleted by coordinated sock puppet rings that moderators didn't catch for months because of how these were silently removed. I still believe moderators should receive some kind of notification on community-deletion of comments flagged as "rude or abusive". Even after working with the new "too many rude comments" auto-flag, I'm still finding many cases where horribly offensive comments are being silently hidden from moderators, so I don't consider this to be fully solved.

Answer 2

It's not only the victim that can notice this, but anyone that saw the original post and noticed that it was deleted as spam/offensive.

There are differences between the malicious spam flags you describe and real ones that could be used to protect against this kind of abuse:

• real spam flags tend to be cast against very new posts, not ones a year old or so
• the user of the spam post almost always has only 1 rep and no positive participation

It might work to simply require moderator action on a spam flag instead of acting automatically if the target user has a significant amount of rep. Those cases should be very rare, and either false positives, or self-promotion cases that would benefit from moderator involvement anyway.

Offensive flags are a bit different. I don't think they cause IP-based measures, but I'm not entirely sure. But I think a strategy similar to the spam flag one could work, as several valid offensive flag against an established user would indicate a situation where moderators might want to be aware even if the post is automatically deleted to enact further consequences.

Alternatively, the flags could be applied automatically in every case just like now, but trigger community-cast flags to make the moderators aware and either confirm everything is okay, or deal with the situation.