I'll see if I can't find a few of them so I can link them directly then.
I certainly remember seeing a few.

As for the chilling effects, the problem with these things has always been a low visibility problem since you have no direct reference to compare against.

The nature is still an active area of research, the going understanding seems to be its a distortion of conformity to norms issue where views are distorted around actions you may signal under certain types of structures (uncertainty and ambiguity).

All you may see locally is skewed activity such as lower activity or less or no discussion in the words (regardless of meaning context) of posts signaled negatively in this way, very little disagreement.

You'd see more collective downvoting for neutral and any subjects related or touching on subjects signaled. Not enough for you to notice anything thought.

In many respects it follows a similar structure in education and reeducation under Mao, called the hot-potato, Lifton covers the details.

Objectively, you'd see higher downvotes, as well for anyone that did try to discuss these things, higher squelch marks, even neutral positions that may be tangentially related may lose speaking power/karma.

Unless you are running statistical analysis on a basket of subjects with a solid baseline, you likely wouldn't notice a thing, and that's by structure, which is why its insidious.

Certain structures of elements short circuit perception and take advantage of a psychological blindspots, while reducing our ability to react and recognize the problem.

I don't want to get too theory laden, but here's an example you should be able to do at any retail store.

If you go to a retail store, there are indicators of what the store owner values or doesn't value. If you see cameras everywhere watching everyone gratuitously, things are locked up even the cheap items, you get a sense that the store owner or operator doesn't value or trust their customers. This observation uses reflective appraisal, and once its made, we may choose to ignore it, but it still impacts our reasoning in our choices to remain consistent beings.

From the owner's perspective, they may need it to collect data for insurance, or prevent theft, but what matters is what's reflected.

These judgments largely happen beneath critical thought and perception, and we can examine parts of that critically afterwards, but not in any way that will really change our judgment because of a consistency blindspot.

Internally our psychology morphs to remain consistent, and that's a bias we all have. When you see car salesmen seeking agreement through carefully constructed phrasing, they are using this blindspot to influence you to buy a car. Its predictable so if you answer in any but a few different specific ways, they know you'll buy if there are no other external factors.

Even if what we see was distorted intentionally, we won't notice.

The action with the structure described creates a distorted reflected appraisal centered around each action, keeping readers and commenters guessing, its not something people will consciously notice unless they've been trained to, but it shows up in statistically significant ways.

Its impossible to determine the exact measure of it because its impossible to determine a reference measure of what people would have said or done if it didn't exist. It is significant enough to show drops in viewing certain Wikipedia pages (related to the NSA/PRISM disclosures) during a time of high news coverage.

I've linked a few articles that are relevant to this if you are inclined that are fairly well respected in the academic literature, hopefully that is sufficient to demonstrate its a real thing. Its abstract, and largely unnoticed, but the effects are not.

https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/scholarly_works/3080...
https://btlj.org/data/articles2016/vol31/31_1/0117_0182_Penn...

As for how it can become destructive, it usually comes down to the evaporative cooling effect in social networking, which follows a much older understanding related to volunteerism, where volunteers stop volunteering when they are coerced (or have cost imposed).

There are many places this is true quite commonly with entities like HOA board of directors where directors who volunteered may resign under social pressure and harassment of neighbors. There were some studies done in the 80s iirc that confirmed this but none that really stand out in my mind that I can link here.

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...