Stealth banning

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Stealth banning (also called Shadow banning and Hell banning) is a practice used by some online community managers to block content they do not like or regard as "politically incorrect". The practice involves making a user's contributions invisible to all other users, but visible to themselves, making them less likely to create new accounts to add the same material. Often this blocks the targeted user's contributions while making it look as if they were "lost" due to a website error. Shadow banning is often widely used as a weapon to silence conservatives on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. Opinions that are likely to get you shadow-banned on social media include (but are not limited to): promoting what the establishment describes as "conspiracy theories" (such as Holocaust revisionism, white genocide and Cultural Marxism), supporting Donald Trump, criticizing Islam (often labelled as "Islamophobia"), opposing abortion, defending traditional man-woman marriage, opposing the LGBTQ ideology, objecting to anti-white racism, objecting to immigration policies and refugees - or exposing corruption, rigged voting, war crimes, and criticizing the State of Israel.[citation needed]

Comment ghosting (or Selective invisibility) is where an individual comment is rendered invisible to everyone except the poster in order to eliminate disruption they might otherwise cause.[1] Stealth banning is sometimes also called "Coventry" or "ghost-posting".

Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described shadow banning for online forums in 2006.[2] Software developer and Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood describes a theoretical use of stealth banning for Stack Overflow on his programming blog Coding Horror, explaining that when none of the banned user's posts receives a response, he or she will be likely to become bored or frustrated and leave the site.[3][4] Stealth banning is used, for example, on Hacker News,[5][6] Reddit and Craigslist.[7][8][9]

Stealth banning can be detected by using an anonymous proxy service to see if a post is visible to a separate user; if not, stealth banning may have occurred.

Craigslist has also been known to "Ghost" a user's individual ads, and reportedly their entire account. Although Craigslist is notoriously tight-lipped about their methods of troll and spam prevention, there are a multitude of individual posts from users around the world that have reported and described this phenomenon in great detail[citation needed]. Reportedly, an ad is placed, confirmation is sent that it has been posted. The ad may be viewed in the user's account, but, if ghosted, will fail to show up in the live listings.

See also

References

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