Shadow banning

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

The phrase "shadow banning" has a colloquial history and has undergone some usage evolution. It originally applied to a deceptive sort of account suspension on web forums, where a person would appear to be able to post while actually having all of their content hidden from other users. More recently, the term has come to apply to alternative measures, particularly visibility measures like delisting and downranking.[1]

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 be discouraged[2] from continuing their unwanted behavior or creating new accounts.[3][4]

  1. ^ Leerssen, Paddy. "An End to Shadow Banning? Transparency rights in the Digital Services Act between content moderation and curation". osf.io: 3. doi:10.31219/osf.io/7jg45. Retrieved 2022-12-11.
  2. ^ Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009). "Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls". Wired magazine. Archived from the original on 2015-08-05. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Vice Motherboard 2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Walsh2006 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).