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One social media buzzword that has taken off in recent years is “shadowban.” As the name suggests, it refers to getting banned on social media, without the content creator actually knowing what’s happening, Instead, the content creator gets all kinds of telltale signs – such as the inability to gain new subscribers, a reduction in views for each new video being created, or content no longer appearing on the first page of search results.
This shadowban does not happen by accident. Often, it is the direct result of a large social media platform tweaking its algorithm, such that your content no longer ranks highly. That’s why “shadowbanning” is also known as “algorithmic suppression” – it’s the algorithm doing all the heavy lifting here. What makes this particularly pernicious is that social media platforms have a certain amount of plausible deniability. You can complain all you want as a content creator, and the big social media platforms will basically say, “What? Us? No, you must be mistaken.”
Ways to get shadowbanned
The most popular reason for shadowbanning involves politics. Quite simply, if your political views don’t mesh with those of the big social media platforms, they might find a clever way to tweak the algorithm, such that your political content is never ranked highly, and hence, never shown to people. Companies claim that they are doing this for the public good, even if content creators think otherwise. In some cases, they might act to shadowban all political content during a hotly contested election, such that they can never be blamed for tipping the scales in favor of one party or another.
Another popular reason for shadowbanning involves content that might be inappropriate for children or minors. And, just as with political content, the big social media platforms can say they are doing it for the public good. Thus, any content that features guns or weapons, or illegal substances of any kind, can plausibly be shadowbanned from a site.
Yet another reason for shadowbanning involves content that would get social media platforms in trouble with their advertisers, users, or other stakeholders. Thus, it’s easy to shadowban any content that features obscenity, for example. Or any content that maligns a specific demographic of the population.
And, if all else fails, there’s always “community guidelines.” This is a sort of catch-all term for any content that violates one of the social media platform’s guidelines around community. This reason can be stretched to include all kinds of imagined abuses, such as providing misinformation about current events.
Censorship vs. content moderation
It’s a lot harder to spot shadowbanning than you might think. And that’s because there’s a lot of gray areas, and things are rarely just black or white. Take, for example, “content inappropriate for children.” Obviously, anything overly sexual would fall into this category. But there have been examples of people posting “romantic fantasies” and getting shadowbanned as a result.
Or what about posting misinformation online? Many of the people posting this content – such as content about the COVID vaccines – don’t view their content as misinformation. Instead, they view themselves as truth tellers, who are being unfairly suppressed by the government or some kind of shadowy cabal.
Thus, at the end of the day, the concepts of “censorship” and “content moderation” are starting to blur together. If you are a content creator, you likely view shadowbanning as a form of censorship. However, if you are a social media platform, you likely view it as a form of much-need content moderation. And, really, nobody is to blame except the algorithm.
