shadowban

A shadowban is when a platform quietly limits who can see your posts, without telling you. You can still post as normal, but your content stops showing up in feeds, searches or hashtags.

What does shadowban mean?

To shadowban someone is to hide or restrict their content behind the scenes instead of banning them outright. A shadowbanned user often notices only indirectly: views drop sharply, posts don’t appear under hashtags, or friends say they can’t find their replies.

The word is used both for deliberate moderation and, more loosely, for any sudden drop in reach. Because platforms rarely confirm it, many claims of being shadowbanned are hard to prove, and some are simply bad luck with the algorithm.

How to use shadowban

• “I think I got shadowbanned, my last three videos got almost no views.”
• “They shadowban spam accounts so the spammers don’t realize they’ve been caught.”
• “Is it a shadowban or is my content just boring?”
• “People avoid certain words in captions to dodge a shadowban.”

Why people worry about shadowbans

For creators who earn money online, reach is income, so the fear of a hidden penalty shapes how they post. It’s one reason algospeak exists: people swap sensitive words for code words to stay visible.

Where shadowban comes from

The term is believed to have started among moderators of the Something Awful forums in the early 2000s, where troublemakers could keep posting without realizing nobody else could see them. Merriam-Webster dates the verb to 2007. It became widely known in 2018, when a dispute over Twitter’s visibility settings for some political accounts made headlines.

Related terms

• Algospeak: code words used to avoid filters.
• Ratio: when replies outnumber likes.
• Finsta: a secret second Instagram account.
• Doom posting: gloomy, everything-is-terrible posts.

See more terms like this in our internet slang dictionary.