shadow ban

verb

variants or shadowban

ˈsha-dō-ˌban 

or less commonly shadow-ban

shadow banned or shadowbanned also shadow-banned; shadow banning or shadowbanning also shadow-banning; shadow bans or shadowbans also shadow-bans

transitive verb

: to cause (a user or their content) to be hidden from some or all other users usually without the user's knowledge

Users, the plea explains, will not have any way to know whether or not they have been shadow banned unless they experience a decrease in the audience reach of their posts/tweets.

—Debayan Roy

Black creators on TikTok claim the popular social media app is still "shadow banning" their content—despite the company's pledge to better support creators of color …

—Meira Gebel

How can you know if a post isn't getting shared because it's been shadowbanned or because it isn't very good?

—Geoffrey A. Fowler

We do not shadowban anyone based on political ideology.

—Jack Dorsey, quoted in Wired

This includes shadow-banning accounts to reduce their visibility …

—Rounak Jain

shadowban noun

or shadow ban or less commonly shadow-ban

plural shadowbans or shadow bans also shadow-bans

The shadowban is useful in that rather than someone immediately being locked out and possibly retaliating by, for example, making a new account, the user fades away gradually due to the lack of interaction from other users.

—Adi Robertson

Instead of banning a user outright and informing them of such punishment, a shadowban makes a user's post visible only to themselves.

—Brian Feldman

Allowing a user to continue to post to a forum but limiting who can actually see those posts is commonly known as a shadow ban …

—Dieter Bohn

Examples of shadow ban in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Add these musicians to a long list of users who say they’ve been shadow banned. —Aja Romano, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018

That apparent contradiction may be why shadow ban discourse flared up again this past week. —Aja Romano, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018

Possibly done as an attempt to skirt shadow bans, these users (and presumably some bots) began to employ the word as captions to promote their own clips. —Mikelle Street, Them, 4 Oct. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

2007, in the meaning defined above