How To Tell If You're Shadowbanned Twitter

Going through your Twitter feed, you might have encountered posts regarding shadowbanning. If you're encountering the term for the first time or have seen it but you're still clueless to what it means, here's a quick run-through for you.

Shadowbanning is Twitter's way of intentionally making an account's post undiscoverable to everyone except for them, without them knowing about it. This happens when the app detects suspicious activity from a user. This includes aggressive language, duplicate texts, and identical replies to your own or other posts in succession, among others.

Screenshots from the #TwitterHacked incident showing a moderation panel have surfaced. One screenshot shows a "Trends Blacklist" button, which is a feature we could so far only suspect to exist. It appears to prevent users from influencing the trends.https://t.co/SfSwTmEuMk

— Shadowban Tester (@shadowban_eu) July 16, 2020

How shadowbanning works

There are three kinds of shadowbanning on Twitter:

Thread ban: bans others from seeing your replies to tweets
Search Suggestion ban: bans others from seeing your profile in the search results
Search ban: bans your tweets from the search results, even if it matches the exact search words used

Check if you are shadowbanned here.

Take note that an account can go through all these bans at the same time. The best way to lift these shadowbans is to stop all activity until your account functions normally again. Continuously posting more may cause Twitter to prolong the ban on an account. Newer users or those with a small number of followers may be shadowbanned easier compared to verified accounts.

A new #Shadowban-Tester for Twitter can be found on https://t.co/9zxUiMAdvX. It also checks for Quality-Filter-Discrimination #QFD, which hides your posts in searches.

— Shadowban Tester (@shadowban_eu) June 22, 2018

When an account is shadowbanned, other users have to manually go to their accounts to see their posts. This lasts from 48 hours or up to five days, depending on your Twitter activity.

People post online to share thoughts, photos, significant events, stories, and other similar content. Being shadowbanned is like removing the "social" in social media, since others cannot see content that you have been posting, thus losing the chance to interact.

Afraid that you're currently shadowbanned? You can check your account with Shadowban.eu. Simply type in your handle name and click the "check" button to find out if you've been shadowbanned or not. The service was unavailable for some days in November-December 2020 but has now been restored. If you want you can donate to support them or choose to skip and just use the service.

Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Aslı Gönen.