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From: Stealth banning and it is intended to return there. NOTE: sorry about the mess (citation needed tags), this is nowhere near deployment. -- Endercase

Stealth banning (also called shadow banning, hell banning, ghost banning[1], or User Discouragement[2]) is the act of blocking a user or their content from an online community such that the user does not realize that they have been banned.

By making a problem user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope is that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site.[1][3][4][5] If the user never becomes aware that they were banned, it is less likely to occur to them to attempt to circumvent that ban.[citation needed]

The system is a more complex example of the "don't feed the troll" approach to community management.[5][additional citation(s) needed]

Notable Examples

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A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning".[6][7]

WeChatwas found in 2016 to ban posts and messages from China-based accounts that contain certain keywords without notice.[8] [9]

In a study that looked at tweets from 2014 to early 2015, over a quarter million tweets were found during the one year period in Turkey to have been censored[10] via shadowbanning.

Twitter was also found, in 2015, to shadowban tweets containing leaked documents in the US, though Twitter claims this is a bug.[11] In 2017 Twitter implemented a "timeout" feature where accounts could be temporarily restricted such that only their followers could read their message[12]. This is similar to error banning but because it has notification[citation needed] it is not stealth banning.

Craigslist has also been documented "ghosting " a user's individual ads; and reportedly entire accounts in 2017.[13][14][15] Reportedly, an ad is placed and 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.[citation needed]

Early on, Reddit implemented a similar feature, initially designed to address spam accounts, though it is also used for general users.[16] In 2015, Reddit added an account suspension feature,[17] though still makes extensive use of shadowbanning. 

Also, In 2017 the phenomenon was noticed on Instagram, there certain posts have been seen to be unavailable to people who do not follow you in hashtag searches.[18][19][20] [additional citation(s) needed] There has even been a website launched to check to see if an account has be affected.[21][additional citation(s) needed]

Variations

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Hellbanning
Where the targeted users are introduced to a variety of "errors" or "bot control" measures without notification. [citation needed]
Slowbanning
Where problem users have loading delays or other slowing measures introduced into pages they visit on the site, in the hope that their participation will be reduced.[5][additional citation(s) needed]
Errorbanning
When the problem user is served error messages, usually fake, as they browse the site.[5][additional citation(s) needed]
Coventry
The practice of allowing specific groups of users to see each others' posts but post are not visible to other users .[citation needed]
Comment ghosting (also known as "selective invisibility")
The practice of rendering an individual post invisible to a portion of viewers, usually all viewers except the poster without notification.[4][additional citation(s) needed]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Lavelle, Peter (10 December 2016). "Ghost Banning on Social Media – the start of systematic censorship". The Duran. Retrieved 2 January 2017.
  2. ^ "Discouraging and Banning | XenForo". XenForo. Retrieved 2017-04-26.
  3. ^ Robert Walsh (12 January 2006). Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. Apress. p. 183. ISBN 978-1-4302-0114-4. So one of the things we did in FogBugz to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone is, well, you take their post and make it invisible to everyone else, but they still see it. They won't know they've been deleted. There's no one fanning their flame. You can't get into a flame war if no one responds to your criticism. So they get silenced and eventually just go away. We have several ways of telling if they come back, and it's been proven to be extremely, extremely effective. Say a spammer posts to your board and then they come back to check if it's still there, and they see it—to them it's still there—but no one else sees it, so they're not bothered by it.
  4. ^ a b Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009). "Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls". Wired magazine. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
  5. ^ a b c d Atwood, Jeff. "Suspension, Ban or Hellban?". Coding Horror blog. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
  6. ^ Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  7. ^ "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando.
  8. ^ {{Cite web |url=https://boingboing.net/2016/12/02/chinas-we-chat-shadow-bans.html%7Ctitle=China's We Chat "shadow-bans" messages with forbidden keywords, but only for China-based accounts|website=Boing Boing|access-date=2017-04-29}}
  9. ^ {{Cite news |url=https://citizenlab.org/2016/11/wechat-china-censorship-one-app-two-systems/%7Ctitle=One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally - The Citizen Lab|date=2016-11-30|work=The Citizen Lab|access-date=2017-04-29|language=en-US}}
  10. ^ Tanash, Rima S.; Chen, Zhouhan; Thakur, Tanmay; Wallach, Dan S.; Subramanian, Devika (2015-01-01). "Known Unknowns: An Analysis of Twitter Censorship in Turkey". Proceedings of the 14th ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society. WPES '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM: 11–20. doi:10.1145/2808138.2808147. ISBN 9781450338202. S2CID 207229086.
  11. ^ Ohlheiser, Abby; Ohlheiser, Abby (2015-10-30). "Tweets are disappearing on Twitter. Why?". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2017-04-29.
  12. ^ Bohn, Dieter (2017-02-16). "One of Twitter's new anti-abuse measures is the oldest trick in the forum moderation book". The Verge. Retrieved 2017-02-17.
  13. ^ "The Craigslist Lawsuit". Finally, it remains unresolved whether craigslist's well-recognized practice of "ghosting" (the hiding or interception of user postings and emails) without the users' knowledge or consent is legal or ethical.Quoting: "Ghosting - Why don't my posts show up on Craigslist?".
  14. ^ "How to Prevent Ghost Posting on Craigslist". Small Business - Chron.com.
  15. ^ "Ghosting on Craigslist".
  16. ^ krispykrackers. "On shadowbans. • r/self". Reddit.
  17. ^ Shu, Catherine. "Reddit Replaces Its Confusing Shadowban System With Account Suspensions". TechCrunch. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
  18. ^ Lorenz, Taylor (June 7, 2017). "Instagram's "shadowban," explained: How to tell if Instagram is secretly blacklisting your posts". Mic Network Inc. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  19. ^ Wong, Kristin. "How to See If Your Instagram Posts Have Been Shadowbanned". Lifehacker. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  20. ^ "Photographers Claim Instagram is 'Shadow Banning' Their Accounts". PetaPixel. 2017-03-28. Retrieved 2017-04-26.
  21. ^ "Are You Shadowbanned on Instagram? This Website Can Tell You". PetaPixel. 2017-04-19. Retrieved 2017-04-26.

Further reading and external links.

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