Shadowbanning Is Big Tech’s Big Problem

Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned. Republican politicians have been accusing Twitter of shadowbanning—that is, quietly suppressing their activity on the site—since at least 2018, when for a brief period, the service stopped autofilling the usernames of Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as other prominent Republicans, in its search bar. Black Lives Matter activists have been accusing TikTok of shadowbanning since 2020, when, at the height of the George Floyd protests, it sharply reduced how frequently their videos appeared on users’ “For You” pages. (In explanatory blog posts, TikTok and Twitter both claimed that these were large-scale technical glitches.) Sex workers have been accusing social-media companies of shadowbanning since time immemorial, saying that the platforms hide their content from hashtags, disable their ability to post comments, and prevent their posts from appearing in feeds. But for almost everyone who believes they have been shadowbanned, they have no way of knowing for sure—and that’s a problem not just for users, but for the platforms.

When the word first appeared in the web-forum backwaters of the early 2000s, it to refer to the wide range of ways platforms may remove or reduce the visibility of their content without telling them.