When I say "up the chain," I mean towards the admins. A platform isn't gonna let just anyone start a chain, because any random loser could just be the start of an access chain for a bunch of bots, with no oversight. So I conclude that the chain would necessarily start with the website admins.

My experience online is that the upper levels of moderation/administration feel beholden to no one once they get enough users. It's been shown time and time again that you can act like a dictator if you have enough people under you to make some of them expendable. It might not be a problem on, say, db0. However, I've seen Discord servers that are big enough to have this problem. I could definitely see companies abusing this to minimize risk.

So, for example, pretend Reddit had this system during the API nonsense:

• You're a nobody who is complaining about it.
• Spez sees you are dissenting and follows your chain.
• Turns out you're probably gonna ask for a guarantee from people you share some sort of relationship/community with, even if it's cursory.
• Spez suspends everyone up the chain for 14 days until he reaches someone "important" like a mod.
• Everyone points fingers at you for daring to say something that could get them in trouble, and you suffer social consequences, subreddit bans, etc.
• Spez keeps doing this, but randomly suspends mods up the chain that aren't explicitly loyal to Reddit (the company).
• People start threatening to revoke access from others if they say things that break Reddit ToS or piss off the admins.
• Dystopia complete

Maybe I'm still misunderstanding how this system works, but it seems like it would start to run into problems as a website got more users and as people became reliant on it for their social life (like I am with Discord and some of my friends/family are with Facebook).