Shadow banning on Twitter, What is it & Why it is happening on Twitter

Shadow banning has been around for a long time on the Internet and it goes way back before Twitter or Facebook. We are talking about the days when there was no option to ban a bad user from online discussion forums. The bad user may be throwing around spammy links or violating the rules and admin just use to hide that it so no one else saw that user’s future posts, it’s like turning the user into a ghost. They didn’t know they were dead but they got the hint later when everyone stopped interacting with them. The benefit of this option was that if a user knew he is kicked off, he would make another account to continue the bad behavior. This is a whole concept of shadow banning on Twitter.

On Thursday Morning, President Donald Trump said on Twitter and accused the social network of shadow banning prominent Republicans. After that reactions came from all over the world and Twitter auto-populated the Republicans in its drop-down search box. The twitter authorities clarified it and said:

“We do not shadowban,” Twitter said in a blog post-Thursday. “You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).”

“We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and [we’re] shipping a change to address this,” a Twitter spokesperson said earlier in the day. “The profiles, tweets, and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them. To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets.”

shadow banning on Twitter – Is what’s happening on

In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter. This approach looks at account behavior & interactions with other accounts that violate our rules. https://t.co/FsLO6NwyNw

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

We can see still posts from all the Republicans including Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. The White House, McDaniel, and Gaetz didn’t respond yet to any comment. Maybe your Twitter account didn’t come in searches but it doesn’t mean that you have been shadow banned.

Kevin Lee, a trust and safety architect at Sift Science further cleared this point about shadow banning on Twitter and said:

“Our leaders need to identify how the technology works to make informed decisions (or public-facing commentary), especially when their work can have such an impact on how such technologies are used and regulated,”

Also Read: World’s Biggest Celebrities have Lost Millions of Twitter Followers