shadow ban

Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul
by Kurt Wagner
Published 20 Feb 2024

were not appearing in search results on Twitter: Bryan Menegus and Tom McKay, “Twitter May Be Demoting Controversial Accounts in Search Results,” Gizmodo, July 22, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/twitter-may-be-demoting-controversial-accounts-in-searc-1827788070. Twitter was “shadow banning” Republican politicians: Alex Thompson, “Twitter Appears to Have Fixed ‘Shadow Ban’ of Prominent Republicans like the RNC Chair and Trump Jr.’s Spokesman,” VICE, July 25, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/43paqq/twitter-is-shadow-banning-prominent-republicans-like-the-rnc-chair-and-trump-jrs-spokesman. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’… Many complaints”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!

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Twitter, July 26, 2018, 4:46 a.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1022447980408983552. “What Is a ‘Shadow Ban,’ and Is Twitter Doing It to Republican Accounts?”: Liam Stack, “What Is a ‘Shadow Ban,’ and Is Twitter Doing It to Republican Accounts?” New York Times, July 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/us/politics/twitter-shadowbanning.html. “We do not shadow ban… viewpoints or ideology”: Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour, “Setting the Record Straight on Shadow Banning,” Twitter Blog, Twitter, July 26, 2018, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning. violated Twitter’s policy against inciting people to violence: Cecilia Kang and Kate Conger, “Twitter Suspends Alex Jones and Infowars for Seven Days,” New York Times, August 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/technology/twitter-alex-jones-suspension.html.

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The user could keep posting, but no one would actually see it. Trump’s tweet instantly pushed the term into the mainstream discussion around social networks. “What Is a ‘Shadow Ban,’ and Is Twitter Doing It to Republican Accounts?” read a headline in The New York Times. Twitter published its own blog on the same day as Trump’s tweet to try to fight the growing tsunami of complaints. It was titled, “Setting the record straight on shadow banning.” “We do not shadow ban,” the company wrote. “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” Republicans weren’t buying Twitter’s denial, especially with Trump now loudly leading the chorus of accusations.

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

In recent months, he had begun to see evidence that something horrible was happening on Twitter, something that he’d started to think of as a sort of virus. A rapidly spreading, silencing force that was stifling comments that didn’t agree with the mainstream, and vanishing accounts—by suspensions, shadow bans, and outright purges—that didn’t bow to majority opinions. If Elon was right, this virus would undermine the very conditions necessary for a global town hall—and by extension, threaten the potential of his overarching mission—which went well beyond electric cars and sustainable energy. A mission that involved, at its core, the very survival of the human race.

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The Twitter Files, a series of tweet-threads filled with data, messages, emails, and dramatic postulation, all derived from Twitter’s internal communication channels, were eventually curated and posted by a rogues’ gallery of well-known conservative and libertarian journalists, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson. The Files, dropped almost at random over the next few weeks, offered a deep look into Twitter 1.0’s inner workings. Specifically, the decision-making around some of its more controversial bans, shadow bans, and outright account suspensions—including the deliberations that had resulted in the silencing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop story and the ban of President Trump. The Twitter Files revealed the platform’s relationship with national intelligence agencies such as the FBI, as well as individual political heavyweights, who had, depending on how you looked at it, either pressured Twitter or made requests of Twitter—for information, account bans, and the elimination of individual tweets.

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What had once seemed theoretical and impersonal was now a real-world nightmare, haunting the corners of his El Cerrito home. His jaw tightened as he pulled the suitcase behind him, hoping his partner was already ahead of him, on his way toward the front door. Because the threats Yoel had now received told him, in no uncertain terms, that the anonymous users, the shadow banned, the voices filled with hate had moved out of the dark corners of the internet—and into Yoel’s life. They knew his name. They knew his face. They knew where he lived. And he had no choice but to run. PART THREE “The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multi-planetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.”

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

It is a serious mistake to underestimate her, or the movements she now helps to lead. Because here is a non-snide version of the “Wait until they hear about cell phones” quip: They know all about cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And Wolf, with her “Five Freedoms” campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do.

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Sign up for the copycat site Gettr, the right-wing Twitter rival started by the former Trump aide Jason Miller: “Unlike the Silicon Valley oligarchs, Gettr will NEVER sell your data.” (Wolf has nearly 200,000 followers there, more than on Twitter before she got booted.) Censored by YouTube? Get an account on Rumble. Shadow banned on Instagram? Try Parler. “Speak freely,” the company urges, on “the premier social media app guided by the First Amendment.” Did GoFundMe refuse to distribute the money you raised to support your favorite Freedom Convoy, claiming the funds would be used to support violence and harassment? Don’t worry, GiveSendGo, “The #1 Free Christian Fundraising Site,” will distribute the cash, along with a prayer, no questions asked.

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Do go on … He keeps his composure, however. Just as he knew in 2016 that Trump could not win without pissed-off, mostly white union guys, he is sure now that pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms—nerves frayed from those years of yo-yo remote schooling and closed gyms; still revved up about vaccine mandates and getting shadow banned on Instagram; genuinely worried about the well-being of their kids and their small businesses; done being dismissed and mocked as “Karens” by mean liberals—are the path to the next right-wing resurgence. Last time, Bannon railed against Wall Street and the globalists who had fleeced the Everyman; now he rails against that plus Big Pharma, Big Tech, and “woke capitalism,” all of which are tormenting the Everymom by poisoning the minds and bodies of her kids.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

A set of established rules emerged for operating mass numbers of accounts at scale while avoiding detection. New accounts needed to be “cultivated” before the platform would judge them trustworthy. This involved mimicking the expected behavior of a typical user. Immediately batch uploading pre-edited videos on a new account was a sure-fire way to get “shadow-banned,” 7 rendering the account useless. The best practice was to passively watch videos for at least seven days before posting anything and record the first few videos within the app using the phone’s camera. Using a separate phone number and SIM card for each account was a must. Never log in through multiple devices—that was a dead giveaway that the account was being operated professionally.

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Zombie phones stacked in racks and operated remotely using automated software. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnpetUlz19A&list=UUXNHI7mRQlUN-pLi6rOwOxg&index=63 4 https://youtu.be/2sUt-9-2Pxo?t=26 5 Image adapted from source article: http://www.woshipm.com/it/2484849.html 6 A complete view is defined as watching the entire video from start to finish 7 A “shadow-banned” video would be deprived of reaching any audience, yet still viewable from the account page. To the account holder it may appear as if the video was just very unpopular. Chapter 1 Yiming “By many quantitative metrics, Zhang Yiming is the top entrepreneur in the world.” 8 -Time Magazine, 2019 * * * 8 Image: Zhang Yiming at Musical.ly head offices in Shanghai Quote source: https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2019/5567716/zhang-yiming/ Chapter Timeline 1983 – Zhang Yiming is born in Longyan, Fujian province, China 2001 – Begins undergraduate study at Nankai University, Tianjin 2005 – Upon graduation, starts own company, fails within six months 2006 – Joins online travel search engine Kuxun as the first engineer 2007 – The first iPhone comes to market 2008 – Brief stint at Microsoft Beijing 2008 – Joins Twitter clone Fanfou 2009 – Becomes CEO of online real estate portal, 99Fang.com 2011 – WeChat’s breakout marks the start of China’s “smartphone era” 2012 – Decides to leave 99Fang.com and start ByteDance “I started reading very young,” 9 Yiming recalled.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

John Brandon, Fox News, September 26, 2016. 40 “It’s not even close”: “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Met with Conservatives over the ‘Trending’ Bias Spat,” Arjun Kharpal, CNBC, May 19, 2016. 41 Vice News story headlined: “Twitter Is ‘Shadow Banning’ Prominent Republicans,” Alex Thompson, Vice News, July 25, 2018. 42 based on a technical: “Twitter’s Not ‘Shadow Banning’ Republicans, but Get Ready to Hear that It Is,” Laura Hazard Owen, NiemanLab.com, July 27, 2018. 43 punishing him for questioning: Tweet by Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz), July 25, 2018. twitter.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1022224027673219072 44 “suppresses conservative voices”: Tweet by Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) July 25, 2018. twitter.com/gopchairwoman/status/1022289868620267522 45 “Enough is enough”: Tweet by Donald Trump, Jr.

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Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, eager to distract from the investigation into Russia’s influence, held counter-messaging hearings that asserted Silicon Valley liberals as the real threat to democracy. Republicans found their smoking gun in a 2018 Vice News story headlined “Twitter Is ‘Shadow Banning’ Prominent Republicans.” The reporter had found that Twitter’s search bar did not auto-populate certain conservative accounts when he typed the first few letters of their names. The story appeared to be based on a technical misunderstanding, but Republicans jumped. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, in a tweet, implied that Twitter was punishing him for questioning the company’s CEO at a recent hearing.

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow
Published 6 Oct 2025

Twiddling Twiddling—the process of changing the costs, prices, recommendation weights, and search rankings through automated or semiautomated means—is a key driver of enshittification. A business with a digital back end can endlessly twiddle all of these virtual knobs. When platforms heat business customers, or shadow ban them, or raise the prices on customers based on surveillance data (like Uber raising the cost of a taxi for riders whose phones are about to run out of battery), or drive you to a more expensive match for your search, they alone know that they’re doing it. Black Facebook users don’t have any way of knowing that they’re being shown ads for more expensive financial products than white users with similar financial histories.

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And of course, the Google antitrust case started under the first Trump administration—and Trump also sued to block the disastrous AT&T/Time Warner merger. Of course, both of these crackdowns were motivated by resentment more than policy: Trump attacked Google as symbolic punishment for the conspiracy theory that Big Tech shadow bans conservatives, and his campaign against Time Warner was payback for unfavorable coverage on CNN. The fact that Trump’s antitrust actions in his first administration were impurely motivated doesn’t mean that these companies were innocent. The Google case—carried forward by Biden’s DOJ under the leadership of Jonathan Kanter—resulted in a stunning victory.

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer
Published 13 Feb 2024

CHAPTER 64 “Every Parent Should Watch This” Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of conservative news site The Daily Wire, was sick of the hypocrisy he saw in Silicon Valley. For years, he’d been locked in a battle with the big tech platforms, fighting to share a conservative message on platforms that seemed bent on censorship. “Tech giants like @youtube, @facebook, @tiktok_us, and—until @elonmusk wrote a check—@Twitter, flagging, banning, throttling, shadow banning, and demonetizing us is a constant occurrence,” Boreing claimed in a tweet. It didn’t matter that these were private platforms enforcing their own policies around misinformation and hate speech. To conservatives like Boreing, it was censorship to punish The Daily Wire’s reporters for violations ranging from misgendering a trans woman to spreading conspiracies about vaccines.

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If this is what you have to do to get paid for the thousands of advertisements on your page, you can count me out. Honestly, I tried to figure out how I could get paid at first because of the size of my engagements and the years of work I’ve put in, but now that I see what’s going on, I’m good. I was totally ignored by everyone I asked about this, except one good person. I’ll just stay shadow-banned and say what I want.” A product manager spun the launch positively to Musk. “Reception was very positive overall, with lots of buzz on and off platform,” he wrote in an internal email. The launch drove a modest increase in Twitter Blue sign-ups, from the daily average of five thousand to around seventy-five hundred, still a small fraction of Twitter’s monetizable daily active users.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1970

All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because “the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes.” God knows the Panther women don‟t spend 30 minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners . . . And here they are, right in front of you, trucking on into the Bernsteins‟ Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts— “. . .

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

” * * * One story Weiss and her team wrote based on the Twitter Files described what was known as “visibility filtering,” the practice of downplaying certain tweets or users by making sure they did not show up high in searches or were touted as trending. At the extreme was a practice known as “shadow banning,” in which users could post tweets and see them, but they were never told that those tweets were invisible to every other user. Twitter did not engage in outright shadow banning in a technical sense, but it did use visibility filtering. In discussions with Yoel Roth, Musk himself had embraced the idea as an alternative to outright user bans, and he had publicly touted the policy a few weeks earlier.

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“One of the biggest areas I’d love research on is non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and de-amplification/visibility filtering,” he wrote in a Slack message to his Twitter team in early 2021. Ironically, when that message emerged as part of Musk’s transparency data dump known as “the Twitter Files” in December 2022, it was seen as a smoking-gun confirmation that conservatives had been subjected to “shadow banning” by liberals at Twitter. Musk approved Roth’s idea of using “visibility filtering” to de-amplify problematic tweets and users as an alternative to permanent bans. He also agreed to hold off on reinstating the Babylon Bee or Jordan Peterson. “Instead,” Roth suggested, “why don’t we take a couple of days to build a version of what this de-amplification system could be.”

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

Barack Obama (@BarackObama), “Even if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick…,” Twitter, February 11, 2020, 4:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1227337897692495873. 21. Allum Bokhari, “Project Veritas Video Shows Former Twitter Employees Discussing ‘Shadow Banning’ Users,” Breitbart, January 11, 2018, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/01/11/project-veritas-video-shows-former-twitter-employees-discussing-shadow-banning-users/. 22. “Twitter Terms of Service,” Twitter, June 18, 2020, https://twitter.com/en/tos. 23. Lucas Nolan, “Google CEO Sundar Pichai Can’t Explain Why Trump Tops Image Search for ‘Idiot,’ ” Breitbart, December 11, 2018, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/12/11/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-cant-explain-why-trump-tops-image-search-for-idiot/. 24.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

And much of the right-wing revolt against the system has a similar attention-seeking quality: conservative populists talk about overthrowing what they see as a left-wing system of surveillance and cultural control, but their specific demands often circle back to a desire for their own place within the system—a space to monetize their YouTube videos and to circulate their pro-Trump memes, free from fears of shadow banning and deplatforming and banishment to obscure apps or social spaces. In other words, Trump-era populism draws a certain kind of energy from moving back and forth across the safety/danger line, but when pressed, it prefers to appeal to the system as a client demanding services, or as a subject demanding its rights, rather than accepting the options for exile—understandably enough, since most of the extrapanoptical options are crawling with white supremacists, and the provocateurs who actually get banished from the social media monopolies soon find themselves unable to monetize their provocations.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

By 2020, Facebook found itself confronting the largest-ever corporate boycott of a social media company, with brands ranging from Adidas to Verizon registering their disapproval of the platform’s role in spreading disinformation.33 Some lawmakers called for breaking up Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Republicans, convinced that tech was secretly censoring and “shadow banning” conservative voices, began holding contentious hearings, featuring sinister names like Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.34 Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House intelligence committee, sued Twitter for defamation.35 Several Republican senators demanded that the Federal Trade Commission look into social media companies’ content decisions.36 In mid-2020, after Twitter had the temerity—for the first time—to affix a gentle fact-check to a tweet from Donald Trump, the president issued a legally questionable executive order threatening to revoke legal protections for social media companies.37 By the summer of that year, amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests for racial justice, a poll found that more than half of Americans had “very little” confidence in social media platforms.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

The algorithms are able to hum through the data more efficiently: PYMK algorithms don’t necessarily restrict their suggestions to two-hop connections, but they dramatically favor them. though some platforms, like Twitter, now allow us to opt out: Interestingly, Twitter enabled users to opt out of algorithmic curation a few weeks after Jack Dorsey faced pressure in congressional hearings regarding accusations that Twitter was biased when it “shadow banned” or “downranked” almost a million people due to the harmful content they or their followers had posted. Stan Horaczek, “Twitter Will Let You See Your Feed in Chronological Order Again—Here’s How and Why,” Popular Science, September 18, 2019, https://www.popsci.com/​twitter-chronological-feed/.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

What is happening is that the service provider is not making the content available to all of the subscribers of the channel, so as far as the end-user is concerned, the video does not exist. Many of those that specifically enable notifications of new video content being uploaded had their notifications switched off by the provider, unbeknownst to them. A more overt version of this is called “shadow banning” and that is where the posts or videos are not seen by anyone, they basically ban the content without officially announcing the ban. Another method is for the platform to simply delete the posts or the videos at a later time, or to go back into the history of the channel and selectively delete videos that they have now deemed to be a violation.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 Elizabeth Williamson, “Alex Jones, Pursued over Infowars Falsehoods, Faces a Legal Crossroads,” New York Times, July 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-defamation-suit-sandy-hook.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 Benjamin Fearnow, “Alex Jones Threatens to Shoot ‘Pedophile’ Robert Mueller, Accuses Zuckerberg of Facebook ‘Shadow Ban,’ ” Newsweek, July 24, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/alex-jones-threatens-shoot-pedophile-robert-mueller-accuses-zuckerberg-1038500. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 Alex Dobuzinskis, “YouTube Removes Videos from Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones: Infowars Website,” Reuters, July 25, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-youtube-infowars/youtube-removes-videos-from-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-infowars-website-idUSKBN1KF36Z; Williamson, “Alex Jones, Pursued over Infowars Falsehoods.”

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

Reddit was, in part, self-policing: Other Redditors would readily downvote moneymaking schemes or spam, if it hadn’t already been filtered by Huffman and Slowe’s algorithms. Huffman himself banned users on the regular, most often “neutering” their content from being viewed by others, even though from their own device it would appear as if nothing about their account had changed. This concept now has a name, “shadow banning,” and it would become infamous over time. Back in 2006, it was simply a superpower wielded by Reddit’s founding team without much question or awareness by the community. This cultural distaste for promotion was instigated by Huffman’s philosophy that Reddit should be a place for genuine discussion, earnest free speech, and anonymity, but users solidified it even as there were those looking to exploit it.

In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
Published 10 Mar 2025

Direct U.S. federal spending alone on Covid relief ­measures totaled more than $5 trillion, nearly a quarter of Amer­i­ca’s gross national product in 2020.10 Mobilization against Covid included extraordinary restrictions on ­free speech. ­Behind the scenes, public officials pressed social media companies to take down or “shadow ban” the accounts and postings of scientists, academics, and social media influencers accused of spreading misinformation and disinformation. In the summer of 2023, a federal judge characterized this effort as the biggest campaign of government censorship in U.S. history.11 That the Covid pandemic was a stress test for our public health agencies, our economy, our educational systems, and our personal relationships are facts of which we are all too painfully aware.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao
Published 19 May 2025

At least twice, on both her Instagram and YouTube, she would accumulate views and then inexplicably lose them. A former Facebook data scientist and two tech and sex work experts say it’s possible that Annie’s very first SeekingArrangement account in December 2019 could have limited her online traction, based on the nature of how tech platforms track and shadow ban sex workers through automated systems by tagging their devices, emails, bank accounts, or other information that ties together their online presence, even for profiles completely unrelated to their sex work. Seeing no other path forward, Annie went back to SeekingArrangement as well as starting an OnlyFans account, entangling her online presence and access to economic opportunities even more in a web of algorithmic moderation.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Published 1 Jan 1990

Bored, he moved to the marketing side in Toronto to try his hand as a salesman. “It’s where the good parties are,” Johnson explained to friends. There, as a low-level manager given the pedestrian task of marketing light bulbs, Johnson first displayed a zest for salesmanship. He dreamed up an idea for a premium-priced bulb, painted on the inside, and researched a name: Shadow Ban. The product did well. Johnson also did wonders for the division’s Christmas-tree bulb sales. As good as he was with light bulbs, it was in his expense accounts that Johnson’s real creativity shone. He cut back the expense budgets of his salesmen, marshaling much of the money for himself. He used the additional funds to entertain customers royally, taking particular delight in plotting and executing what he called “the hundred-dollar golf game,” which involved a day on one of the city’s finer courses, followed by drinks and dinner at one of the city’s finer restaurants.