Shadow banning

Last updated

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hell banning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

Contents

The phrase "shadow banning" has a colloquial history and has undergone some usage evolution. 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. More recently, 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 that spammers and trolls will be discouraged [2] from continuing their unwanted behavior or creating new accounts. [3] [4]

History

In the mid-1980s, BBS forums including Citadel BBS software had 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 website Something Awful in 2001, although the feature was only used briefly and sparsely. [3]

Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described stealth banning for online forums in 2006, saying how such a system was in place in the project management system FogBugz, "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 in flame wars, the system also discouraged spammers, who if they returned to the site would be under the false impression that their spam was still in place. [4] The Verge describes it as "one of the oldest moderation tricks in the book", noting that early versions of vBulletin had 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 to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning" for spamming and abusive behavior. [8] [9]

Early on, Reddit implemented a similar feature, initially designed to address spam accounts. [10] 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. [11] A Reddit user was accidentally shadow banned for one year in 2019, subsequently they contacted support and their comments were restored. [12]

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. [13] Twitter was also found, in 2015, to have shadowbanned tweets containing leaked documents in the US. [14] [15]

Craigslist has 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. [16]

WeChat was 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 "习包子" (Xi Bao Zi), "六四天安门" (June 4 Tiananmen), "藏青会" (Tibetan Youth Congress), and "ئاللاھ يولىدا" (in the way of Allah). [17] [18] 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 on Instagram, with posts which included specific hashtags not showing up when those hashtags were used in searches. [19] [20] [21]

Controversies

Political controversies

"Shadow banning" became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory when Twitter shadow-banned some Republicans. [22] In late July 2018, Vice News found that several supporters of the US Republican Party no longer appeared in the auto-populated drop-down search menu on Twitter, thus limiting their visibility when being searched for; Vice News alleged that this was a case of shadow-banning. [22] [23] After the story, some conservatives accused Twitter of enacting a shadowban on Republican accounts, a claim which Twitter denied. [24] However, some accounts that were not overtly political or conservative apparently had the same algorithm applied to them. [25] Numerous news outlets, including The New York Times , The Guardian , Buzzfeed News , Engadget and New York magazine, disputed the Vice News story. [24] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] 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. [31] In the blog post, Twitter claims it does not shadow ban by using "the old, narrow, and classical" definition of shadow banning. [32] Later, Twitter appeared to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some accounts. [33] 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. [34] [35]

During the 2020 Twitter account hijackings, hackers successfully managed to obtain access to Twitter's internal moderation tools via both social engineering and bribing a Twitter employee. [36] 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. [37]

On December 8, 2022, the second thread of the Twitter Files—a series of Twitter threads based on internal Twitter, Inc. documents shared by owner Elon Musk with independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari 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-right Libs 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". [38] [39] [40]

Conspiracy theories

A form of conspiracy theory has become popular in which a social media content creator suggests that their content has been intentionally suppressed by a platform which claims not to engage in shadow banning. [41] Platforms frequently targeted by these accusations include Twitter, [3] Facebook, [27] YouTube and Instagram. [41]

To explain why users may come to believe they are subject to "shadow bans" even when they are not, Elaine Moore of the Financial Times writes: [41]

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

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reddit</span> American social news and discussion site

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Censorship of Twitter</span> Restrictions to access on Twitter by governments

Censorship of Twitter refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to Twitter. Twitter censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to Twitter, which it enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to Twitter indicating that specific content published on the platform is illegal in their jurisdiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Instagram</span> Social media platform owned by Meta Platforms

Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media use by Barack Obama</span>

Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election on November 4, 2008. During his campaign, he became the first presidential candidate of a major party to utilize social networking sites to expand and engage his audience of supporters and donors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syrian Electronic Army</span> Hacker group affiliated with the Syrian government

The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of computer hackers which first surfaced online in 2011 to support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Using spamming, website defacement, malware, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks, it has targeted terrorist organizations, political opposition groups, western news outlets, human rights groups and websites that are seemingly neutral to the Syrian conflict. It has also hacked government websites in the Middle East and Europe, as well as US defense contractors. As of 2011, the SEA has been "the first Arab country to have a public Internet Army hosted on its national networks to openly launch cyber attacks on its enemies".

On the social news site Reddit, some communities are devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. These subreddits have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities shape and promote biased views of international politics, the veracity of medical evidence, misogynistic rhetoric, and other disruptive concepts.

Ben Eisenkop, known online by his Reddit username Unidan, is an American ecologist. He became popular on the social media website Reddit as the "excited biologist" who answered questions and explained concepts related to biology and ecology before being banned. He was banned from the website for vote fraud – using multiple secret accounts to increase the popularity of his own posts and decrease the popularity of competitors' posts.

On August 31, 2014, a collection of nearly five hundred private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and swiftly disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The leak was dubbed "The Fappening" or "Celebgate" by the public. The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.

Social media played an important role in shaping the course of events surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election. It facilitated greater voter interaction with the political climate; unlike traditional media, social media gave people the ability to create, comment on, and share content related to the election.

r/The_Donald Subreddit in support of Donald Trump

r/The_Donald was a subreddit where participants created discussions and internet memes in support of U.S. president Donald Trump. Initially created in June 2015 following the announcement of Trump's presidential campaign, the community grew to over 790,000 subscribers who described themselves as "Patriots". The community was banned in June 2020 for violating Reddit rules on harassment and targeting. It was ranked as one of the most active communities on Reddit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gab (social network)</span> American alt-tech social media service

Gab is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service known for its far-right userbase. Widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, antisemites, the alt-right, supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives, right-libertarians, and believers in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Gab has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Founded in 2016 and launched publicly in May 2017, Gab claims to promote free speech, individual liberty, the "free flow of information online", and Christian values. Researchers and journalists have characterized these assertions as an obfuscation of its extremist ecosystem. Antisemitism is prominent in the site's content and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Gab CEO Andrew Torba has promoted the white genocide conspiracy theory. Gab is based in Pennsylvania.

A social bot, also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid) via algorithm. Social bots can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to express messages in more natural human dialogue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mastodon (social network)</span> Open source, self-hosted, social media service

Mastodon is a open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, and is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse.

Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump had stated he would not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account remained inactive until he tweeted again in August 2024.

X, formerly Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and X's use of suspensions has been controversial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deplatforming</span> Administrative or political action to deny access to a platform to express opinions

Deplatforming, also called no-platforming, is a form of Internet censorship of an individual or group by preventing them from posting on the platforms they use to share their information/ideas. This typically involves suspension, outright bans, or reducing spread.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gettr</span> Social media platform

Gettr is an alt-tech social media platform and microblogging site targeting American conservatives. It was founded by Jason Miller, a former Donald Trump aide, and was officially launched on July 4, 2021. Its user interface and feature set have been described as very similar to those of Twitter.

The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ElonJet</span> Social media account tracking Elon Musks jet

ElonJet is a service that uses social media accounts to track the real-time usage of Elon Musk's private airplane. The service, created and provided by Jack Sweeney using public data, has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Truth Social, Mastodon, Threads, and formerly on Twitter, where the Twitter account once had about 530,000 followers, before being suspended. Several of the social media accounts use the handle @elonjet.

StoneToss is a pseudonymous American neo-Nazi political cartoonist who publishes a webcomic of the same name. Launched in June 2017, the comic espouses racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and antisemitic views, including Holocaust denial.

References

  1. ↑ 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 . Retrieved 2022-12-11.
  2. ↑ Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009). "Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls". Wired magazine. Archived from the original on 2015-08-05. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Cole, Samantha (31 July 2018). "Where Did the Concept of 'Shadow Banning' Come From?". Motherboard. Retrieved 1 August 2018.
  4. 1 2 Robert Walsh (12 January 2006). Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. Apress. p. 183. ISBN   978-1-4302-0114-4. 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.
  5. ↑ Atwood, Jeff (4 June 2011). "Suspension, Ban or Hellban?". Coding Horror blog. Archived from the original on 30 December 2011. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
  6. ↑ "Manual installation of Citadel using source code and the command line client - Citadel.org". www.citadel.org. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
  7. ↑ Bohn, Dieter (16 February 2017). "One of Twitter's new anti-abuse measures is the oldest trick in the forum moderation book". The Verge. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
  8. ↑ Leena Rao (18 May 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  9. ↑ "Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando. 4 December 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2018.
  10. ↑ krispykrackers. "On shadowbans. • r/self". Reddit .
  11. ↑ Shu, Catherine (November 11, 2015). "Reddit Replaces Its Confusing Shadowban System With Account Suspensions". TechCrunch. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
  12. ↑ Gerken, Tom (2019-04-11). "The Redditor who accidentally spent a year talking to himself". BBC News . Retrieved 2023-03-13.
  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. ISBN   9781450338202. S2CID   207229086.
  14. ↑ Ohlheiser, Abby (30 October 2015). "Tweets are disappearing on Twitter. Why?". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 29 April 2017.
  15. ↑ Pearson, Jordan (October 19, 2015). "Is Twitter Censoring a Blockbuster Report on US Drone Assassinations?". Motherboard . Retrieved 26 July 2017.
  16. ↑ Weedmark, David. "How to Prevent Ghost Posting on Craigslist". Chron.com.
  17. ↑ 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. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
  18. ↑ Doctorow, Cory (December 2, 2016). "China's We Chat "shadow-bans" messages with forbidden keywords, but only for China-based accounts". Boing Boing. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
  19. ↑ Lorenz, Taylor (7 June 2017). "Instagram's "shadowban," explained: How to tell if Instagram is secretly blacklisting your posts". Mic Network Inc. Retrieved 4 November 2017.
  20. ↑ Wong, Kristin (April 23, 2017). "How to See If Your Instagram Posts Have Been Shadowbanned". Lifehacker. Retrieved 4 November 2017.
  21. ↑ "Photographers Claim Instagram is 'Shadow Banning' Their Accounts". PetaPixel. 28 March 2017. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
  22. 1 2 Romano, Aja (6 September 2018). "How hysteria over Twitter shadow-banning led to a bizarre congressional hearing". Vox.
  23. ↑ 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. Retrieved 15 August 2018.
  24. 1 2 Stack, Liam (26 July 2018). "What Is a 'Shadow Ban,' and Is Twitter Doing It to Republican Accounts?". The New York Times.
  25. ↑ Eordogh, Fruzsina (31 July 2018). "Why Republicans Weren't The Only Ones Shadow Banned On Twitter".
  26. ↑ Warzel, Charlie (July 26, 2018). "Twitter Isn't Shadow-Banning Republicans. Here's Why". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  27. 1 2 Feldman, Brian (25 July 2018). "Twitter Is Not 'Shadow Banning' Republicans". Intelligencer. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  28. ↑ Wilson, Jason (27 July 2018). "What is 'shadow banning', and why did Trump tweet about it?". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  29. ↑ Swapna Krishna (26 July 2018). "Twitter says supposed 'shadow ban' of prominent Republicans is a bug". Engadget. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  30. ↑ Laura Hazard Owen (27 July 2018). "Twitter's not "shadow banning" Republicans, but get ready to hear that it is". Nieman Lab. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  31. ↑ "Setting the record straight on shadow banning". Twitter. Retrieved 8 September 2018.
  32. ↑ "Shedding Light on Shadowbanning". Center for Democracy and Technology. 26 April 2022. p. 37. Retrieved 2022-12-11.
  33. ↑ Alex Thompson (26 July 2018). "Twitter appears to have fixed search problems that lowered visibility of GOP lawmakers". Vice. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
  34. ↑ Le Merrer, Erwan; Morgan, Benoit; Trédan, Gilles (2020-12-09). "Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning". arXiv: 2012.05101 [cs.SI].
  35. ↑ Nicholas, Gabriel (2022-04-28). "Shadowbanning Is Big Tech's Big Problem". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2022-12-09.
  36. ↑ Cox, Joseph (15 July 2020). "Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts". Vice.com. Vice. Retrieved 21 January 2024.
  37. ↑ Nathaniel, Popper; Kate, Conger. "Hackers Tell the Story of the Twitter Attack From the Inside". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 January 2024.
  38. ↑ Shapero, Julia (8 December 2022). "Former NYT columnist Bari Weiss releases 'Twitter Files Part Two'". The Hill . Retrieved 9 December 2022.
  39. ↑ 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. Retrieved 2022-12-09.
  40. ↑ "The Twitter Files, Part Two, Explained". Gizmodo. 2022-12-09. Retrieved 2022-12-09.
  41. 1 2 3 Moore, Elaine (13 March 2022). "The truth about 'shadowbanning' is more complicated than influencers think". Financial Times. Retrieved 12 June 2022.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.