Shadowbanning: The secret censoring by social media

Shadowbanning seems a bit fraudulent as well: advertisers are led to believe there's a particular level and type of engagement on the platform, but it's at least partly false.

Shadowbans are a very useful tool against human-powered disruptive activity (sockpuppetry and what-not), because they shift the effort asymmetry to favour the attacker a bit less than it tends to do otherwise. (Given the possibility of being shadowbanned, the attacker has to either constantly check that the fruits of their labour are still accessible, or risk wasting work posting into the void on an account that has already been null-routed)

That this technology, when available, invariably winds up being used against good-faith users seems to be the usual grubby-fingers problem where the powerful take away from the commons of social trust for a temporary advantage, akin to police using COVID contact tracing data to chase small-time drug dealers.

I face this issue regularly on Reddit. I've noticed two things:

1. Sometimes it is accidental and some automated filter does this.

2. Sometimes it is done by a mod who didn't like what you posted, and shadowbans the post instead of deleting it. The hope is that you don't find out about this because otherwise you may enquire about the decision, and other mods will get involved in discussing it and over-rule the previous decision.

Shadowbanning is lying, plain and simple. I don't doubt that it works. Lying often works.

[Oct 2020]

I wish this site would be less heavy handed when it comes to shadow banning. It seems like a significant number of comments ends up getting shadow banned and I find it both frustrating and a bit insulting. Compared to here, Reddit is an oasis of free speech.