If a tweet is deemed offensive, fake or provocative, Twitter employees will use their discretion to restrict the user from the social media feed.
Around this time last year, Twitter began rolling out a new feature whereby they temporarily began reducing the reach of tweets by users they thought were social media offenders. It popped up in conversation today when a right-wing Twitter celebrity, Madhu Purnia Kishwar, tweeted saying she was informed that Twitter had put her handle under shadow ban.
Madhu Kishwar, whose verified Twitter Handle profile says she is a professor and founder of humans rights organization Manushi, was in the news recently when she tweeted that four Muslims were arrested for pelting stones at a school bus in Gurgaon in protest against the release of the film Paadmavat, forcing Haryana Police to clarify that no Muslims have been arrested or detained for the act that was orchestrated by Karni Sena. Kishwar had to apologise and delete the tweet. By then many had reported her account for instigating violence and propagating fake news by making up the names.
"I have been informed that @TwitterIndia has put my handle under #ShadowBan . Therefore, my tweets not reaching my followers. My average increase of followers used to be 2500 to 3000 per day. Now stagnant & my posts being #ShadowBanned," she tweeted.
'Shadow banning' is reportedly a tactic employed by the social media platform banning twitter users without actually banning them. If a tweet is deemed offensive, fake or provocative, Twitter employees will use their discretion to restrict the user from the social media feed.
Last year, Buzz Feed article broke the news that Twitter Is Now Temporarily Throttling Reach Of Abusive Accounts.
It said: “The protocol (that was rolled out) temporarily prevents tweets from users Twitter deems abusive from being displayed to people who don't follow them, effectively reducing their reach. If the punished user mentions someone who doesn't follow them, for instance, that person would not see the tweet in their notifications tab. And if the punished user's followers retweet them, those retweets wouldn't be shown to people who don't follow them.”
Twitter had introduced steps to bring down the level of abuse on the platform on February 7, last year through filters and permanently banning proscribed users. But they had kept the criteria to get oneself shadow-banned vague to stop users from gaming the system.Basically, it’s like putting a one-way glass window between the user and the Twitter community.
But such is not the case with Madhu Kishwar. Her verified handle was the first one to appear when a person who didn’t follow her searched for her handle. On the other hand, Kishwar's pinned tweet on Shadow-banning her account has 483 retweets till now.
The Problem with Shadow Banning-
Shadow-banning appears to be a shady business where the twitter user is at the mercy of the twitter employee scrutinising their tweets. Twitter, or any other social networking site for that matter, is not liable to inform you why they shadow-banned you.
A report by the Lifestylenews speaks on a problematic aspect of the shadow-banning technique. It appears to be politically one-sided and biased.
In a series of secretly recorded videos of Twitter employees and former employees, his report claims that California-based Twitter headquarters automatically screens words like 'guns', 'Trump', 'America' or 'Conservative' in the handle names and follows an unspoken liberal culture.