Does Yahoo ever penalize people for intentionally filing false abuse reports?

I have looked over your Q&A and you answer a lot in Religion & Spirituality. R&S is known to have lots of trolls and nasty rants. Trolls will get you, and in many cases the questions may make you rant and insult, thus against the Guidelines, thus getting reported.

Yes, they do. The trust system is quite complicated, and I'll try to explain it. Everyone starts in level one, and the started trust level. If you report posts that violate the guidelines and others have reported and the post was removed, your trust increases. But when you falsely report, your reports become less effective.

No one has any way of knowing that people intentionally file false abuse reports. I've seen cases of people thinking something is a violation when it isn't. But more often, I see people asking about their questions or answers they are sure were miss-reported, when they were in fact violations.

People are not punished for miss-reporting. Unless you can prove it was intentional, there's no way of knowing if it was or not. What happens is if a person miss-reports too often, even unintentionally, they just lose respect in the Community, which means when they do report, even a serious violation, their report may not be considered. They can quickly turn that around once they are reporting accurately.

If you report correctly enough times you will be able to report and get an instant deletion. But if you are a new user or haven't reported correctly enough times, Yahoo! has to decide what happens to the answer

^^ Also; appealing DOES NOT do anything except give you a personal looking auto-reply saying they don't care in nicer words.

Yes, so I'll explain it to you in two parts:

1. If the person who you reported successfully appealed the violation, your trust level goes down. That means you have less impact on reporting abuse here in the future.

2. Anyone frequently misusing this feature are at risk of getting their accounts suspended, period.

You can appeal violations. I've never been notified of an appeal or an improper deletion, but I don't delete questions or answers unless they clearly violate the rules.