Shadow banning

**Stealth banning** (also called **shadow banning**, **hell banning** or **ghost banning**) is a practice used by some online community managers to block content added by spammers and Internet trolls, as well as other individuals whose interests do not coincide with the managers'. The practice involves making a user's contributions invisible to all other users, but visible to the person who made the contribution; making him or her less likely to create new accounts to add the same material. Often this blocks the problem user's contributions while making it look like they were "lost" due to a website error. It is used to lower the likelihood of trolls or malicious users from registering new accounts to continue trolling.

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 not create new accounts.

## Variations

**Hellbanning**: Where the targeted users are introduced to a variety of "errors" or bot control measures. Some examples of this would be:

* "slowbanning", where problem users have loading delays introduced into every page they visit on the site, in the hope that their participation will be reduced.
* "errorbanning", when the problem user is served fake error messages at random as they browse the site.

**Coventry:** The practice of allowing specific groups of users to see each others' posts within the "group" but not other users. Basically, allowing moderators to fence in and manage specific ideologies or behavior traits. This is the earliest recorded form of stealth banning done with the 'twit room".

## History

In the mid-1980s, BBS forums including *Citadel* BBS software had a "twit bit" for problematic users. When enabled, the user would have limited access, and commonly still be able to read public discussions; however, any messages posted by that "twit" would not be shown to the other users of that group.

Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described stealth banning for online forums in 2006, saying how such a system was in place in the project management system FogBugz, "to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone". As well as preventing problem users from engaging in flame wars, the system also discouraged spammers, who if they returned to the site would be under the false impression that their spam was still in place. *The Verge* describes it as "one of the oldest moderation tricks in the book", noting that early versions of vBulletin had a global ignore list known as "Tachy goes to Coventry", as in the British expression "to send someone to Coventry", meaning to ignore them and pretend they don't exist.

A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning" for spamming and abusive behavior.

Craigslist has also been known to "ghost" a user's individual ads, whereby the poster gets a confirmation email and may view the ad in their account, but the ad fails to show up in the appropriate category page.

Early on, Reddit implemented a similar feature, initially designed to address spam accounts, though it is also used for general users. In 2015, Reddit added an account suspension feature, though the site still makes extensive use of shadow banning.

WeChat was found in 2016 to ban posts and messages that contain certain keywords without notice.

In a study that looked at tweets from 2014 to early 2015, over a quarter million tweets were found during the one-year period in Turkey to have been censored via shadow banning. Twitter was also found, in 2015, to shadowban tweets containing leaked documents in the US.

The phenomenon was noticed on Instagram in 2017; there, certain posts have been seen to be unavailable to people who do not follow one in hashtag searches.

"Shadow banning" became popularized in 2018 as a conspiracy theory that Twitter had shadow-banned Republicans. In late July 2018, *Vice News* found that several supporters of the US Republican Party no longer appeared in the auto-populated drop-down search menu on Twitter, thus limiting their visibility when being searched for; *Vice News* alleged that this was a case of shadow-banning. After the story, some conservatives accused Twitter of enacting a shadowban on Republican accounts, which Twitter flatly denied. However, some accounts that were not overtly political or conservative apparently had the same algorithm applied to them. Numerous news outlets, including *The New York Times*, The Guardian, Buzzfeed News, Engadget and New York magazine, disputed the *Vice News* story. In a blog post, Twitter said that the use of the phrase "shadow banning" was inaccurate, as the tweets were still visible by navigating to the home page of the relevant account. Later, Twitter appeared to have adjusted its platform to no longer limit the visibility of some accounts.