What Is Shadow Banning on Twitter?

The president is wrong (!

)Twitter doesnt intentionally hide accounts based on political affiliation.

But there actually was something screwy happening to certain accounts, including those of some Republican figures.

Whats a shadow ban?

The user is allowed to keep posting, but their posts dont show up to anyone but themselves.

So a shadow ban is a tool against abuse and spam.

Ina blog post about the supposed shadow ban, Twitter says no:

We do not shadow ban.

And we certainly dont shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

You could say that Twitter is untrustworthy, but theres no real reason to believe that.

Twitterdoesmake some accounts easier to discover than others.

Again, why dont they use this on the Nazis?)

So gee, maybe prominent Republicans need to stop encouraging abusive behavior!

Twitter says this no one got blocked from normal search results.

Auto-completing usernames is more immediately noticeable than auto-completing words in a Google search.

But this impact was not limited to a certain political affiliation or geography, says Twitter.

Some Democratic politicians were not properly showing up within search auto-suggestions as result of this issue.

And most accounts affected had nothing to do with politics at all.

Again, if they were lying, that would be very out of character.

If the company wants to punish right-wingers, it has many more effective ways to do so.

Instead the company avoids punishing politicians accounts even for straightforward violations.

Butbreaking the site with a bugisincharacter.

Recently, Republican celebrity and former Milwaukee County sheriffDavid Clarketemporarily took his account private.

You cant retweet a private account.

is an old complaint from people who want more attention, especially extremists.

I think Ive been shadowbanned.

So dont worry about getting shadow banned.