Shadow-banning

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Shadow banning, also known as stealth banning, hell banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting, is a practice done in social media, with the objective to censor, block or hide information that might be considered sensitive for the company, a government or an entity, not showing evident signals to the publisher that their content has been banned.

How it works

Shadowbans typically use practices to think the publisher has still visible their post or content. Common practices usually involve into hiding posts from algorithm recommendations or search results, and making the posts visible for the publishers. More aggressive practices hide completely the posts and making them completely inaccesible from links, but the posts are still visible by the publishers.

Why it is a problem

Censorship

Shadow bans can be used as a form of arbitrary censorship, preventing users to share information that might even be legal or harmless. There have even been cases in which such content is prematurely age gated due to legislature. This practice could also be used to silence whistleblowers of important public knowledge that a cooperation may spend to cover it up.

Distortion of information

Shadow bans might be used to hide facts or opinions and generate artificial biases or false perspectives as a method to manipulate users online and make them to change their opinion or perspective on something.

Privacy

With the increasing number of platforms adopting some form of age attestation or verification, some platforms may outright choose to shadowban you even if you are compliant and do not violate any of the terms for using such an account. The increasing LLM platform content moderation where your identity used to verify your account could also have access to all your other accounts and shadow ban them simultaneously based on a post or remark that you may have shared regardless of how old it was.

False positives

Several social media platforms use automated moderation to shadow ban content, usually resulting in algorithm mistakes that flag harmless content and accordingly damage a user's visibility on social media.

Examples

Reddit shadow-banning users that have been on the platform for years with tons of karma for using a VPN for there platform

Instagram shadow-banning users for "hashtag abuse" or specific hashtags that the platform did not like

WeChat shadow-banning messages in china reguarding specific phrases or words mandated by there goverment