Re:Shadowbanning Is Real
by kelipso on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @02:55PM
(#34153006)
Spammers etc have the resources and the know how to detect shadow banning. Just use a VPN and perform a trivial check. The typical user who gets shadowbanned are the ones paying the highest price (posting into a void for years without knowing it).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I don't know if it's that simple. If you deliberately search for the shadowbanned content, you are going to find it. The action being taken is to not serve it in algorithmically driven feeds to users who aren't necessarily looking for it. There are so many variables at play, it can be hard to know if something is truly being shadowbanned.
Shadow banning has various definitions. The typical definition is how it works (worked?) on Reddit: you could see your own comments and posts when logged in, but no one else would.
The "shadow ban" on Twitter that's garnering so much attention was manual down ranking of content. I'm not even sure if it's productive to call this shadow banning. Some content is given more visibility by the algorithm than others. Nobody is surprised by this. The main distinction in Twitter is that the downranking was manual, done to specific accounts. This realistically can't be detected, not evaded since abandoning a popular Twitter account is not an option. And for famous people, the downranking would be applied to their new account anyway.