“Twitter is working on one functionality that clearly reveals the status of each accountto clearly understand if a user has suffered a shadowban “: so said Elon Musk, last December 9th.
A few hours before, the American journalist Bari Weiss had published on his personal account the second installment of the so-called Twitter Files (which we talked about here)dedicated precisely to accounts and content hidden from the social network during the coronavirus pandemic.
Among the many themes (some even questionable) ridden by Musk in the second half of 2022, the shadowban is one of the most heartfelt ones when it comes to social networks. One figure is enough to tell the story: on TikTok alone, two of the hashtags on the subject together accumulate almost 30 billion views. Because since 2001, the year in which the term appears for the first time in a forum, the shadowban indicates an unclear practice from the point of view of users, which concerns the limitation of the visibility of a content or an account.
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What is shadowban
In practical terms, the shadowban is one form of moderation content: it can affect all those users or posts that do not clearly violate the rules of the digital space in question, but which are considered borderlinebecause they are problematic or potentially dangerous for the community.
When content is shadowbanned, it is not eliminated but distributed to a smaller number of people or made it impossible to find by hashtag. In more severe cases, an entire account can be hidden and disappear from a social network’s internal search engine results.
Each social platform uses algorithms that, based on subscriber preferences, compose their feed, every time they log in. Systems that amplify some contents, for example those that receive many interactions but which inevitably end up hiding others, based on different criteria. This is even more true today: the TikTok model, which many other social networks are trying to replicate, it entrusts almost entirely control to the algorithm, which establishes the schedule for each user and, consequently, determines the visibility of each published video.
The definitionIn short, it is quite clear. The point is that at least two other issues concerning the shadowban are unclear.
Hidden without knowing it
The first point concerns the modalities of this practice. Let’s imagine post content that clearly violates the rules of a social network: in all likelihood, that post will be deleted and we will be notified with a notification or (in worse cases) even suspended or banned from that platform.
Shadowban is different: the user is not informed. And this is one of the reasons why it is a kind of myth, because the opacity helps to fuel legends and good news practices (such as the so-called algospeak) to avoid disappearing from the feeds of your followers. In other words, when a person is shadowbanned, he realizes it (or suspects it) because his contents are viewed by a lower number of people than usual, but there are no other indications and there are no official confirmations.
Does shadowban exist?
In the construction of this opacity a fundamental role was played by the social platforms themselves which, in different ways, have always denied the existence of the shadowban, starting with a famous Twitter blog post from 2018. The same thing TikTok didwhen Black Lives Matter activists accused the app of hiding rumors of the 2020 protest. And so did Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, responding directly to a user’s question.
Over the years, the platforms have gradually admitted practices of relegation of some content: for example, Meta has a dedicated page where it lists all the types of posts that get demoted on Facebook, from low-quality videos to clickbait to inauthentic shares; last have, Instagram has published a post in which, for the first time, the word shadowbanning is referred to without clearly denying its existence.
Also TikTok, in the section dedicated to community guidelines, lists a series of types of videos that may not appear in For You, which is a sort of homepage of the social network. The point is that these categories are volatile and unpredictable. Last October, the Washington Post conducted an experiment on TikTok comparing two almost identical videos, starting from the idea that the one published second would be penalized because it was copied. In fact, the latter got a lot more views than the original.
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The only way to shed light on this opacity would be explain to users if and why they are shadowbanned. And in recent weeks something has been moving: after Musk’s announcement, Twitter has only provided users with the possibility of consulting the views of all the tweets published. A feature that, according to The Verge, would be “meaningless”.
On the other side, Instagram is developing a function to display, within the section Account Statusif the published contents are recommended to users or if a penalty of some kind is in progress and possibly for which post and for what reason: “An account – Mosseri explained in a video – may end up in a condition where he is not considered suitable for recommendation”.
An almost official confirmation: the shadowban, like also explained by Geoffrey Fowler in an article in the Washington Post, exists. And it may be time to make this practice more understandable for users.