Shadow banningis the practice ofblockingor partially blocking auseror the user's content from some areas of anonline communityin such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or analgorithm.For example, shadow-bannedcommentsposted to ablogor mediawebsitewould be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.
The phrase "shadow banning" has a colloquial history and has undergone some evolution of usage. It originally applied to a deceptive sort of account suspension on web forums, where a person would appear to be able to post while actually having all of their content hidden from other users. In 2022, the term has come to apply to alternative measures, particularly visibility measures like delisting and downranking.[1]
By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and thatspammersandtrollswill be discouraged[2]from continuing their unwanted behavior orcreating new accounts.[3][4]
Terminology
editThe practice is also calledstealth banning,hell banning,ghost banning,andcomment ghosting.
History
editIn the mid-1980s, BBS forums includingCitadelBBS softwarehad a "twit bit" for problematic users[3][5]which, when enabled, would limit the user's access while still allowing them to read public discussions; however, any messages posted by that "twit" would not be visible to the other members of that group.[3][6]
The term "shadow ban" is believed to have originated with moderators on the websiteSomething Awfulin 2001, although the feature was only used briefly and sparsely.[3]
Michael Pryor ofFog Creek Softwaredescribed stealth banning for online forums in 2006, saying how such a system was in place in the project management systemFogBugz,"to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone". As well as preventing problem users from engaging inflame wars,the system also discouragedspammers,who if they returned to the site would be under the false impression that their spam was still in place.[4]The Vergedescribes it as "one of the oldest moderation tricks in the book", noting that early versions ofvBulletinhad a global ignore list known as "Tachy goes to Coventry",[7]as in the British expression "to send someone to Coventry",meaning to ignore them and pretend they do not exist.
A 2012 update toHacker Newsintroduced a system of "hellbanning" for spamming and abusive behavior.[8][9]
Early on,Redditimplemented (and continues to practice)[10]shadow banning, purportedly to address spam accounts.[11]In 2015, Reddit added an account suspension feature that was said to have replaced its sitewide shadowbans, though moderators can still shadowban users from their individual subreddits via their AutoModerator configuration[12]as well as manually. A Reddit user was accidentally shadow banned for one year in 2019, subsequently they contacted support and their comments were restored.[13]
A study of tweets written in a one-year period during 2014 and 2015 found that over a quarter million tweets had been censored in Turkey via shadow banning.[14]Twitterwas also found, in 2015, to have shadowbanned tweets containing leaked documents in the US.[15][16]
Craigslisthas also been known to "ghost" a user's individual ads, whereby the poster gets a confirmation email and may view the ad in their account, but the ad fails to show up in the appropriate category page.[17]
WeChatwas found in 2016 to have banned, without any notification to the user, posts and messages that contain various combinations of at least 174 keywords, including "Tập bánh bao" (XiBao Zi), "Sáu bốn ngày an môn" (June 4 Tiananmen), "Xanh đen sẽ" (Tibetan Youth Congress), and "ئاللاھ يولىدا" (in the way ofAllah).[18][19]Messages containing these keywords would appear to have been sent successfully but would not be visible on the receiving end.
In 2017, the phenomenon was noticed onInstagram,with posts which included specific hashtags not showing up when those hashtags were used in searches.[20][21][22]
Controversies
editPolitical controversies
edit"Shadow banning" became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory when Twitter shadow-banned some Republicans.[23]In late July 2018,Vice Newsfound that several supporters of the USRepublican Partyno longer appeared in the auto-populated drop-down search menu on Twitter, thus limiting their visibility when being searched for;Vice Newsalleged that this was a case of shadow-banning.[23][24]After the story, some conservatives accused Twitter of enacting a shadowban on Republican accounts, a claim which Twitter denied.[25]However, some accounts that were not overtly political or conservative apparently had the same algorithm applied to them.[26]Numerous news outlets, includingThe New York Times,The Guardian,Buzzfeed News,Engadget andNew Yorkmagazine, disputed theVice Newsstory.[25][27][28][29][30][31]In a blog post, Twitter said that the use of the phrase "shadow banning" was inaccurate, as the tweets were still visible by navigating to the home page of the relevant account.[32]In the blog post, Twitter claims it does not shadow ban by using "the old, narrow, and classical" definition of shadow banning.[33]Later, Twitter appeared to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some accounts.[34]In a research study that examined more than 2.5 million Twitter profiles, it was discovered that almost one in 40 had been shadowbanned by having their replies hidden or having their handles hidden in searches.[35][36]
During the2020 Twitter account hijackings,hackers successfully managed to obtain access to Twitter's internal moderation tools via bothsocial engineeringand bribing a Twitter employee.[37]Through this, images were leaked of an internal account summary page, which in turn revealed user "flags" set by the system that confirmed the existence of shadow bans on Twitter. Accounts were flagged with terms such as "Trends Blacklisted" and "Search Blacklisted" implying that the user was not able to publicly trend, or show up in public search results. After the situation was dealt with, Twitter faced accusations of censorship with claims that they were trying to hide the existence of shadow bans by removing tweets that contained images of the internal staff tools used. However, Twitter claimed they were removed as they revealed sensitive user information.[38]
On December 8, 2022, the second thread of theTwitter Files—a series of Twitter threads based on internalTwitter, Inc.documents shared by ownerElon Muskwith independent journalistsMatt TaibbiandBari Weiss—addressed a practice referred to as "visibility filtering" by previous Twitter management. The functionality included tools allowing accounts to be tagged as "Do not amplify", and under "blacklists" that reduce their prominence in search results and trending topics. It was also revealed that certain conservative accounts, such as the far-rightLibs of TikTok,had been given a warning stating that decisions regarding them should only be made by Twitter's Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP–PES) team—which consists primarily of high-ranking officials. The functions were given by Musk and other critics as examples of "shadow banning".[39][40][41]
Conspiracy theories
editA form ofconspiracy theoryhas become popular in which asocial mediacontent creatorsuggests that their content has been intentionally suppressed by a platform which claims not to engage in shadow banning.[42]Platforms frequently targeted by these accusations includeTwitter,[3]Facebook,[28]YouTubeandInstagram.[42]
To explain why users may come to believe they are subject to "shadow bans" even when they are not, Elaine Moore of theFinancial Timeswrites:[42]
Like Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers, social media influencers are at the mercy of algorithms. This makes them perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. It also makes sense that influencers would be baffled by any sudden decrease in engagement and spooked by changes that might jeopardise the brand deals they sign. Instead of believing that their own popularity is waning, some cling to the idea that shadowbans are a disciplinary measure that is used against creators who do not warrant an outright ban from a platform.
See also
editReferences
edit- ^Leerssen, Paddy."An End to Shadow Banning? Transparency rights in the Digital Services Act between content moderation and curation".osf.io:3.doi:10.31219/osf.io/7jg45.Retrieved2022-12-11.
- ^Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009)."Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls".Wired magazine.Archived fromthe originalon 2015-08-05.Retrieved6 July2014.
- ^abcdeCole, Samantha (31 July 2018)."Where Did the Concept of 'Shadow Banning' Come From?".Motherboard.Retrieved1 August2018.
- ^abRobert Walsh (12 January 2006).Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality.Apress. p. 183.ISBN978-1-4302-0114-4.
So one of the things we did in FogBugz to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone is, well, you take their post and make it invisible to everyone else, but they still see it. They won't know they've been deleted. There's no one fanning their flame. You can't get into a flame war if no one responds to your criticism. So they get silenced and eventually just go away. We have several ways of telling if they come back, and it's been proven to be extremely, extremely effective. Say a spammer posts to your board and then they come back to check if it's still there, and they see it—to them it's still there—but no one else sees it, so they're not bothered by it.
- ^Atwood, Jeff (4 June 2011)."Suspension, Ban or Hellban?".Coding Horror blog. Archived fromthe originalon 30 December 2011.Retrieved17 December2011.
- ^"Manual installation of Citadel using source code and the command line client - Citadel.org".citadel.org.Retrieved20 December2020.
- ^Bohn, Dieter (16 February 2017)."One of Twitter's new anti-abuse measures is the oldest trick in the forum moderation book".The Verge.Retrieved17 February2017.
- ^Leena Rao (18 May 2013)."The Evolution of Hacker News".TechCrunch.Retrieved10 August2014.
- ^"Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?".Pando.4 December 2013. Archived fromthe originalon 4 Dec 2018.Retrieved1 August2018.
- ^Shah, Saqib."What is a 'shadow ban'? Lizzo claims TikTok is shutting her videos out of its algorithm".The Standard.Retrieved8 February2025.
- ^krispykrackers."On shadowbans. • r/self".Reddit.
- ^Shu, Catherine (November 11, 2015)."Reddit Replaces Its Confusing Shadowban System With Account Suspensions".TechCrunch.Retrieved16 September2017.
- ^Gerken, Tom (2019-04-11)."The Redditor who accidentally spent a year talking to himself".BBC News.Retrieved2023-03-13.
- ^Tanash, Rima S.; Chen, Zhouhan; Thakur, Tanmay; Wallach, Dan S.; Subramanian, Devika (1 January 2015). "Known Unknowns".Proceedings of the 14th ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society.WPES '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp.11–20.doi:10.1145/2808138.2808147.ISBN9781450338202.S2CID207229086.
- ^Ohlheiser, Abby (30 October 2015)."Tweets are disappearing on Twitter. Why?".The Washington Post.ISSN0190-8286.Retrieved29 April2017.
- ^Pearson, Jordan (October 19, 2015)."Is Twitter Censoring a Blockbuster Report on US Drone Assassinations?".Motherboard.Retrieved26 July2017.
- ^Weedmark, David."How to Prevent Ghost Posting on Craigslist".Chron.
- ^Ruan, Lotus; Knockel, Jeffrey; Ng, Jason Q.; Crete-Nishihata, Masashi (30 November 2016)."One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally".The Citizen Lab.Retrieved29 April2017.
- ^Doctorow, Cory (December 2, 2016)."China's We Chat" shadow-bans "messages with forbidden keywords, but only for China-based accounts".Boing Boing.Retrieved29 April2017.
- ^Lorenz, Taylor(7 June 2017)."Instagram's" shadowban, "explained: How to tell if Instagram is secretly blacklisting your posts".Mic Network Inc.Retrieved4 November2017.
- ^Wong, Kristin (April 23, 2017)."How to See If Your Instagram Posts Have Been Shadowbanned".Lifehacker.Retrieved4 November2017.
- ^"Photographers Claim Instagram is 'Shadow Banning' Their Accounts".PetaPixel.28 March 2017.Retrieved26 April2017.
- ^abRomano, Aja (6 September 2018)."How hysteria over Twitter shadow-banning led to a bizarre congressional hearing".Vox.
- ^Thompson, Alex (26 July 2018)."Twitter appears to have fixed" shadow ban "of prominent Republicans like the RNC chair and Trump Jr.'s spokesman".Vice News.Retrieved15 August2018.
- ^abStack, Liam (26 July 2018)."What Is a 'Shadow Ban,' and Is Twitter Doing It to Republican Accounts?".The New York Times.
- ^Eordogh, Fruzsina (31 July 2018)."Why Republicans Weren't The Only Ones Shadow Banned On Twitter".
- ^Warzel, Charlie (July 26, 2018)."Twitter Isn't Shadow-Banning Republicans. Here's Why".BuzzFeed News.Retrieved13 February2019.
- ^abFeldman, Brian (25 July 2018)."Twitter Is Not 'Shadow Banning' Republicans".Intelligencer.Retrieved13 February2019.
- ^Wilson, Jason (27 July 2018)."What is 'shadow banning', and why did Trump tweet about it?".The Guardian.ISSN0261-3077.Retrieved13 February2019.
- ^Swapna Krishna (26 July 2018)."Twitter says supposed 'shadow ban' of prominent Republicans is a bug".Engadget.Retrieved13 February2019.
- ^Laura Hazard Owen (27 July 2018)."Twitter's not" shadow banning "Republicans, but get ready to hear that it is".Nieman Lab.Retrieved13 February2019.
- ^"Setting the record straight on shadow banning".Twitter.Retrieved8 September2018.
- ^"Shedding Light on Shadowbanning".Center for Democracy and Technology.26 April 2022. p. 37.Retrieved2022-12-11.
- ^Alex Thompson (26 July 2018)."Twitter appears to have fixed search problems that lowered visibility of GOP lawmakers".Vice.Retrieved28 March2019.
- ^Le Merrer, Erwan; Morgan, Benoit; Trédan, Gilles (2020-12-09). "Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning".arXiv:2012.05101[cs.SI].
- ^Nicholas, Gabriel (2022-04-28)."Shadowbanning Is Big Tech's Big Problem".The Atlantic.Retrieved2022-12-09.
- ^Cox, Joseph (15 July 2020)."Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts".Vice.Vice.Retrieved21 January2024.
- ^Nathaniel, Popper; Kate, Conger."Hackers Tell the Story of the Twitter Attack From the Inside".The New York Times.Retrieved21 January2024.
- ^Shapero, Julia (8 December 2022)."Former NYT columnist Bari Weiss releases 'Twitter Files Part Two'".The Hill.Retrieved9 December2022.
- ^Urquhart, Evan (2022-12-09)."The Anti-Trans Hate Account That Bari Weiss Says Is Yet Another Right-Wing Voice Censored by Twitter".Slate Magazine.Retrieved2022-12-09.
- ^"The Twitter Files, Part Two, Explained".Gizmodo.2022-12-09.Retrieved2022-12-09.
- ^abcMoore, Elaine (13 March 2022)."The truth about 'shadowbanning' is more complicated than influencers think".Financial Times.Retrieved12 June2022.