How to Tell if You’re Shadowbanned on Social Media

Suddenly you notice that none of your social media activity seems to be showing up at all. It’s like you don’t even exist on the site… Weird!

Is it a bug? Every website suffers from them sometimes, and the interactive features can often be the first to go haywire. Server maintenance could also be the culprit.

But another possibility is that you might have been “shadowbanned” (previously called ghostbanned).

Accounts that are shadowbanned are put into a kind of invisible mode. In other words, they become a “shadow” that no one can see.

In this post, we’ll talk more about what exactly shadowbanning is, and how you can tell if it happened to you.

What Is Shadowbanning?

Shadowbanning is when your posts or activity don’t show up on a site, but you haven’t received an official ban or notification.

It’s a way to let spammers continue to spam without anyone else in the community (or outside of it) seeing what they do.

That way, other social media users don’t suffer from spam because they can’t see it. The spammer won’t immediately start to look for ways to get around the ban, because they don’t even realize they’ve been banned.

Now, all of this might sound a little odd or shady. Since many websites and apps deny that they shadowban, there’s no way to know for sure that it’s happened.

If you suspect a shadowban, a change in the website’s search or newsfeed algorithm might actually be to blame. And since the algorithms are the property of social media companies, it’s not in their best interest to reveal everything about them publicly.

Regardless of whether you’ve been penalized deliberately or accidentally, the effect is still the same… no one can see your posts.

Sites That Shadowban

There’s no way of getting a full list of sites that shadowban people, since the practice isn’t entirely out in the open.

However, shadowbanning has been reported before under certain circumstances, on sites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, among others.

Respondents to a survey called Posting Into the Void reported four general types of shadowbans:

a username or hashtag not showing up in search suggestions
a decrease in follower engagement
certain features (e.g. likes or replies) being blocked
a temporary ban that then reverts back to normal later on

Here’s how to tell if you’ve been shadowbanned on some popular social media sites:

Twitter Shadowbanning

Does Twitter actually shadowban people? Well, yes and no.

In a blog post, Twitter claimed that they don’t “deliberately make people’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it”, and they “certainly don’t shadowban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

However, they did say they “rank tweets and search results” to “address bad-faith actors”. Basically, if Twitter thinks you’re a spammer or a troll, its algorithm will penalize your content.