Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting, is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community so that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media site will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers. By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will not create new accounts.
Notable examples
In the mid-1980s, BBS forums including Citadel BBS software had a "twit bit" for problematic users. When enabled, the user would have limited access, and commonly still be able to read public discussions; however, any messages posted by that "twit" would not be shown to the other users of that group. Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described stealth banning for online forums in 2006, saying how such a system was in place in the project management systemFogBugz, "to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone". As well as preventing problem users from engaging in flame wars, the system also discouraged spammers, who if they returned to the site would be under the false impression that their spam was still in place. The Verge describes it as "one of the oldest moderation tricks in the book", noting that early versions of vBulletin had a global ignore list known as "Tachy goes to Coventry", as in the British expression "to send someone to Coventry", meaning to ignore them and pretend they do not exist. A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning" for spamming and abusive behavior. Craigslist has also been known to "ghost" a user's individual ads, whereby the poster gets a confirmation email and may view the ad in their account, but the ad fails to show up in the appropriate category page. Early on, Reddit implemented a similar feature, initially designed to address spam accounts. In 2015, Reddit added an account suspension feature. WeChat was found in 2016 to ban posts and messages that contain certain keywords without notice. In a study that looked at tweets from 2014 to early 2015, over a quarter million tweets were found during the one-year period in Turkey to have been censored via shadow banning. Twitter was also found, in 2015, to shadowban tweets containing leaked documents in the US. The phenomenon was noticed on Instagram in 2017, when certain posts have been seen to be unavailable to people in hashtag searches. "Shadow banning" became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory that Twitter had shadow-banned Republicans. In late July 2018, Vice News found that several supporters of the US Republican Party no longer appeared in the auto-populated drop-down search menu on Twitter, thus limiting their visibility when being searched for; Vice News alleged that this was a case of shadow-banning. After the story, some conservatives accused Twitter of enacting a shadowban on Republican accounts, a claim which Twitter flatly denied. However, some accounts that were not overtly political or conservative apparently had the same algorithm applied to them. Numerous news outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Buzzfeed News, Engadget and New York magazine, disputed the Vice News story. In a blog post, Twitter said that the use of the phrase "shadow banning" was inaccurate, as the tweets were still visible by navigating to the home page of the relevant account. Later, Twitter appeared to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some accounts.
