Twitter to Start Telling Users When Their Account Has Been ‘Shadowbanned’

Elon Musk took to Twitter early this morning to announce a surprising new feature is being worked on: finding out if you are “shadowbanned.”

Shadow banning is when a user’s account gets blocked or muted, but has no knowledge the block is in place. To them, their tweets/comments appear as normal, but nobody else can see them, or at least part of the wider community can’t. It’s effectively rendering someone’s content undiscoverable on purpose.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

It’s a surprising feature announcement by Musk because shadow banning is something Twitter has always insisted the platform doesn’t do(Opens in a new window). Evidence that it does first appeared in 2018 as a conspiracy theory regarding Republicans being shadowbanned, but was caused by a Twitter algorithm change preventing hundreds of thousands of accounts no longer being auto-suggested—many of those accounts turned out to be conservative and Republican politicians.

In his tweet, Musk says the new feature will take the form of a true account status and users will be able to see if they are shadowbanned, why it happened, and how they can appeal the decision to impose it.

As to why this feature is being announced now, it’s most likely because of what “The Twitter Files” are revealing. The Files are internal Twitter documents Musk recently shared with journalist Matt Taibbi and The Free Press editor Bari Weiss. In a recent Twitter thread(Opens in a new window) by Weiss, it’s revealed(Opens in a new window) that “Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”

Weiss goes on to say that Twitter calls shadow banning “Visibility Filtering(Opens in a new window)” and said one Twitter employee explained, “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.”

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