The origin of “gaslight” is a movie where a husband surreptitiously removes objects from the room, dims and brightens the lights, etc. and pretends the changes were just the wife’s imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)#Plot
Removing bookmarks from someone’s list without notification seems at least broadly comparable (in both cases, the victim is confused and might question their own memory, because the state of the world changed in an incongruous way), though it is the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human.
> albeit the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human
Yes, if you remove a major part of the definition (intent) then it can fit whatever you want it to fit. Like Gino D'Acampo most famously said [1], if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
I think it’s a fair use of the term. I’d maybe feel differently if there was a better term to use for “non-intentional gaslighting”, but afaik there isn’t really.
How about we coin a term today, "LEDlighting"? (Pronounced Led-Lighting).
"When a digital platform's state is altered in an opaque way without input on the user's behalf that directly commanded it to, and as a result causes them to question reality in the form of either their memory, the actual state of the system itself, or whether or not the system was intentionally made to do it by an unseen human."
Shadowbans, whether you think they're a good form of moderation or not, would be an example of LEDlighting.
In a game if the chat system stops working but the rest of the game works and everyone thinks they have been muted for some unknown infraction of the rules by an overreaching moderator, that's also LEDlighting.
Removing bookmarks from someone’s list without notification seems at least broadly comparable (in both cases, the victim is confused and might question their own memory, because the state of the world changed in an incongruous way), though it is the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human.