Is Your Own Government Censoring You? X’s New Shadowban Detector Reveals the Truth
X is the platform of free speech, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when it will limit the reach of a post to comply with platform policies or the government. Luckily, there’s a new reporting feature that will tell you if and when you’ve been shadowbanned, and you can use it right now.
Shadowbanning is the act of arbitrarily limiting the reach of a user’s post without his knowledge, warning, or consent. From the user’s perspective, his content will simply drop views and engagement with no explanation. Meanwhile, the social platform virtually removes the post from its algorithm so that the content isn’t served to as many users, if at all. The post is still visible on the user’s main profile page, but to the rest of the social network, it basically doesn’t exist.
Shadowbans, even on a free speech platform like X, are issued for a number of reasons: spam behavior, like mass following and unfollowing accounts or overusing hashtags, having a post reported by too many users, violating X’s safety policies, and requests from local law enforcement or the government, usually over “hate speech” or breaches of national security.
For what it’s worth, X’s official stance on shadowbanning is that it doesn’t do it, according to a blog post published in 2018, long before the Musk acquisition. This, however, has been proven false plenty of times in the past. For instance, conservative voices were silenced in 2018 and again in 2020 when the FBI met with Twitter to censor Charlie Kirk, Libs of TikTok, and Dan Bongino.
Needless to say, this has happened on and off for many years. (Read more from “Is Your Own Government Censoring You? X’s New Shadowban Detector Reveals the Truth” HERE)
