Your social media posts, as far as
you can tell, are great, but they do not they get any engagement. Are you being
“
shadow banned”?
اضافة اعلان
The term refers to the perception — real or
imagined — that social media companies are taking stealth actions to limit a
post’s visibility. And it has been coming up a lot lately.
Just last month, Elon Musk — Twitter’s new
billionaire owner and a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” — used the
term in the context of the so-called Twitter Files, internal company documents
that were released with Musk’s authorization. They showed that Twitter
officials had debated blocking reporting from the New York Post on Hunter
Biden, son of the current president, in October 2020, a month before the
presidential election.
Musk said the documents proved that the
company’s leaders at the time had engaged in shadow banning. Twitter initially
defended its action on the grounds that the reporting was unverified but later
said it would change its policy for similar content.
In the same month, Musk was himself accused
of shadow banning. The college student behind the
Twitter account @ElonJet,
which tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private plane, learned from Twitter
employees that it had been deliberately silenced, and tweeted about it. The
account is now suspended.
The very notion that our online activity
can be manipulated by a platform without our knowing it can be unnerving, said
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of computer science and law at Harvard
University.
The very notion that our online activity can be manipulated by a platform without our knowing it can be unnerving
“
Shadow banning is the worry by any user
that they are howling into the void, that they have been placed in a bubble and
it’s undisclosed,” he said.
The term traces to at least 2012, when
Reddit users accused the platform’s administrators of banning a link to a
Gawker article while publicly championing transparency.
The meaning of the term has evolved over
time. Now, users may throw around “shadow ban” to describe general discontent
about not getting the attention they believe they deserve on social media, even
if they do not necessarily think a platform has engaged in any clandestine
moderation.
Private companies are allowed to make their
own rules about content moderation, but for advertisers, users, and free speech
champions, true shadow bans are problematic because they enforce unarticulated
rules secretly, said Katharine Trendacosta, a tech policy expert at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. They allow a company to avoid taking
responsibility for moderating content while quietly manipulating its flow. And
those who are silenced have no process for emerging from the shadows.
Zittrain of Harvard said the debates around
shadow banning highlighted societal divides and the two big issues plaguing
tech companies handling the tsunami of online content.
“We can’t agree on what we want,” he said,
“and we don’t trust anyone who tells us they can handle it.”
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