Going through your Twitter feed, you might have encountered posts regarding shadowbanning. If you’re encountering the term for the first time or have seen it, but you’re still clueless about what it means, here’s a quick run-through for you. What we are describing here will help you to know more about the Twitter shadowban, and after reading this post, you are will be familiar with How To Check If Your Twitter Account Is Shadowbanned.
Shadowbanning is Twitter’s way of intentionally making an account’s post undiscoverable to everyone except for them, without them knowing about it. This happens when the app detects suspicious activity from a user. This includes aggressive language, duplicate texts, and identical replies to your own or other posts in succession, among others.
Screenshots from the #TwitterHacked incident showing a moderation panel have surfaced. One screenshot shows a "Trends Blacklist" button, which is a feature we could so far only suspect to exist. It appears to prevent users from influencing the trends.https://t.co/SfSwTmEuMk
— Shadowban Tester (@shadowban_eu) July 16, 2020
How shadowbanning works
There are three kinds of shadowbanning on Twitter:
- Thread ban: bans others from seeing your replies to tweets
- Search Suggestion ban: bans others from seeing your profile in the search results
- Search ban: bans your tweets from the search results, even if it matches the exact search words used
Check if you are shadowbanned here. (link to https://shadowban.eu/ removed as it is no longer available)
Update: 8th of February 2022 – Please note that the service is not available as of now. You can, however, try this yourself using the how-to guide “How to Check if You Are Shadowbanned on Twitter” from WikiHow.
Take note that an account can go through all these bans at the same time. The best way to lift these shadowbans is to stop all activity until your account functions normally again. Continuously posting more may cause Twitter to prolong the ban on an account. Newer users or those with a small number of followers may be shadowbanned easier compared to verified accounts.
A new #Shadowban-Tester for Twitter can be found on https://t.co/9zxUiMAdvX. It also checks for Quality-Filter-Discrimination #QFD, which hides your posts in searches.
— Shadowban Tester (@shadowban_eu) June 22, 2018
When an account is shadowbanned, other users have to manually go to their accounts to see their posts. This lasts from 48 hours or up to five days, depending on your Twitter activity.
People post online to share thoughts, photos, significant events, stories, and other similar content. Being shadowbanned is like removing the “social” in social media since others cannot see content that you have been posting, thus losing the chance to interact.
Afraid that you’re currently shadowbanned? You can check your account with Shadowban.eu. (link removed due to unavailability) simply type in your handle name and click the “check” button to find out if you’ve been shadowbanned or not. The service was unavailable for some days in November-December 2020 but has now been restored. If you want, you can donate to support them or choose to skip and just use the service.
Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Aslı Gönen.
