Everyone has a slightly different feed geared towards maximum engagement for users in your demographic.
But, engagement isn't the only way that one might wish to manipulate the content of social media: you could produce political or social pressure (just like Bingsbly Dollars who owns the newspapers.)
This could be as much about what you choose to show as what you choose NOT to show.
4/
This kind of manipulation is not illegal, and some of the people running platforms have said it is their goal.
You won't be able to notice this manipulation because it is only a little different from your usual feed. It's just that, for example, any tikToks about factories polluting the river never show up.
It need not take the form of anything obvious such as someone gushing that they think factories are amazing and good for the town.
5/
In fact, if you are someone who cares about pollution you might even see SOME of the stories about the factory, just fewer of them, and those that are less alarming.
In a way it is harder to detect bias in a social media algorithm than in a newspaper. It's much harder to prove since everyone is seeing a different collection of stories.
That doesn't mean the situation isn't the same.
6/
I realize this might all sound very basic and obvious, but I think about it a lot, and I've run into people who haven't really connected all of these things into a familiar image.
I apologize if it's all too obvious.
7/7
"This kind of manipulation is not illegal, and some of the people running platforms have said it is their goal."
It just hit me that this is just a fact, but when people talk about things like shadow banning it's always treated like it's kind of conspiratorial and a little crazy.
And to be fair claiming no one is reading your original novel about elves due to a "shadow ban" is probably silly. But, the idea that there are broad topics being suppressed? It's not just possible it is likely.
Aug 21, 2026, 6:55 PM@futurebird
I’m Rania from Gaza 💔
We lost our home, and now my children and I are living in a fragile tent with no protection from the cold, heat, or insects.
My children suffer every day, and I am unable to provide their basic needs 💔
Please don’t leave us alone. Any donation or share could help us survive 🙏🤍
🔗 Help & donation link in bio.
Aug 21, 2026, 7:04 PM@futurebird Even here on Fedi, there are a handful of people on the payroll of the Dollars family, but they curate an image of Brave Independent Truth Tellers, often using their megaphone and trusted status to funnel their readers to other platforms, which are coincidentally owned by Dollars.
@futurebird
even Mastodon servers shadow ban people. I often get “do you want to let this person follow you?” messages when I don’t screen follows, or “do you want to see notifications from this person?” Generic accompanying message that mastodon.social seems to find them annoying in some undefined way.
Aug 21, 2026, 8:19 PM@richpuchalsky @futurebird hm, having to approve followers is just a setting you can enable, the 'do you want to see notifications' thing im honestly not sure where comes from
honestly these aren't shadow bans since you still see them, a better example would be like federation blocks or something. to the user on their original instnace, evyerthing is fine, its shread with whoever they federate with, but not with anyone who blocks the instance,,
i guess
Aug 21, 2026, 8:35 PM@Li @richpuchalsky @futurebird it's not the user setting, but some moderation function. The shadow ban is in that you'll never see the user's posts unless they explicitly interact with you (mention or try to follow) and you explicitly allow it via some extra steps (I.e. you get a message that you have a message from someone you have to allow temporary interaction from).
Though really we live in the old times around here, viral posts have to be manually shared by lots of real people. Most people only really see things from people they follow, or things that people they follow share.
That this makes the content much higher quality than what I see on facebook? What could that possibly mean?
Facebook shows me a photo of a sweet black child who is missing an arm trying to stack blocks, he's so precious. Is he real?
"inspiring stories" it says...
Facebooks shows me a woman in tight clothes being hit on a plane "passenger gets what's coming!" it says. (She does look annoying...)
This is pure ID stuff.
And I'm mad that it kind of works on me.
@futurebird @Mabande @Li @richpuchalsky We shouldn't be mad at ourselves that manipulative stuff works on us. We should be mad at the people doing the manipulative stuff.
Being mad at yourself because you were fooled (which you to be honest didn't specify that you were, just "mad", sorry if I overinterpreted) is a major component of how cons work.
@ahltorp @Mabande @Li @richpuchalsky
This is good advice. I'm mad that something made to manipulate my emotions is tugging on my emotions. I'm mad that I don't know if the kid is even real or not.
I'm annoyed their system can make a few good guesses about what I might care about.
Aug 21, 2026, 10:15 PM@futurebird @ahltorp @Mabande @Li @richpuchalsky
What does it cost to leave?
@mousey @ahltorp @Mabande @Li @richpuchalsky
I only post there when I share threads like this one about how I think facebook is bad. All of my posts are like "facebook is terrible" but I notice things when I go over there to put up the posts.
Aug 21, 2026, 9:40 PM
@futurebird @Mabande @Li @richpuchalsky Time to leave Facebook, IMO
It's not shadow ban, it's the user (or more often, the server) having been silenced.
I'm on such "silenced" lists from what I can infer, never knew why, but hey, whatever floats their boat...
Anyway, my point is that's an official feature of the Mastodon moderation, if it bothers you see with your instance moderator how he does things/should do things in your opinion.
Aug 22, 2026, 7:41 AM@lienrag @Li @richpuchalsky @futurebird Funny thing is this exactly the thing I'd call a shadow ban: silencing an account or instance, limiting its visibility.
Not an outright ban (or block), but no one can see their posts unless active steps are taken.
Also, there's no official list of silenced accounts AFAIK, so you won't know until you get suspicious.
(the reply's on this post because I don't know if it'll only ever be seen by the tagged if I reply directly to the silenced post by Lien)
Aug 22, 2026, 7:47 AM@Mabande @lienrag @richpuchalsky @futurebird there is no official list because there cannot be- mastodon is not controlled by a single entity or organization, users who are silenced differs from instance to instance .. many instances do actually create a public list of every user or instasnce who has been silenced or defederated, or whatever
for example; tech.lgbt provides this information (only for silenced or blocked instances, not for users-) here; https://tech.lgbt/about but also only if you are signed in.
Aug 22, 2026, 8:16 AM@Li @richpuchalsky @futurebird Yes, I know there's no fediwide unified blocklist (and I know there's wild opposition to building tools to share lists), I was talking official as "what's shown by an instance".
Point being: a silenced user who do not know they're silenced is shadowbanned.
I'm not saying it's a per definition bad moderation tool, I'm just saying that it's pretty much the definition of it.
A "shadow ban" is not some kind of intrinsic evil. It's how I ban accounts so I don't need to argue with them about "why am I banned?" but on the fedi these things are local and user driven.
They can be imperfect. But I think that imperfection is better than whatever X and facebook are calling moderation.
Shadow bans can be used at a whole lot of different levels: maybe algorithmic steering is a better term? Although that doesn't specify whether the steering is an emergent property of the system or a dictat from on high, like Tiktok's decision that videos mentioning death were going to be shadowbanned.
Shadowbanning is classically when the person being blocked doesn't get any indication that this is happening -- not the person who is being urged to block them.
I know that having to approve followers is a setting I can enable. I don't have it enabled. There are still some people who try to follow me and I get a "do you want this person to follow you?" message because my server thinks they are annoying in some way.
Aug 21, 2026, 8:41 PM@richpuchalsky @futurebird the thing where you have to approve users following you is just this; im pretty sure
@richpuchalsky @Li @futurebird
Can confirm: when people try to follow my songwriting account on musicians.today, sometimes they just can, and other times it's an approval step despite my not having approvals switched on.
That step often seems to happen for new accounts without their profile filled in, or not much there yet? I don't think I've ever seen one where I couldn't imagine _some_ reason why this one had been given the extra step. Don't entirely know how it works, but I assume that the m.t mods made that choice at some point.
I sort of imagine it must be some kind of automatic flag, because it'd be a lot of work otherwise. Probably wouldn't be too tricky to hinge it on e.g. lack of profile info or <10 posts or a "previously reported" flag or something like that.
I don't remember having the same thing happen on this account (on scicomm.xyz).
@Li
It applies to profiles an instance has hidden, regardless of whether you've configured your settings to hold followers for approval or not.
And yeah, it's not like a complete shadow ban, as you still receive the notification...
I don't think that's a shadowban. But when I "suppress posts" from a spammer using the mod tools THAT might count. This means that on our server that users posts will only show to people who are following them.
You can use the word how you like of course, but there is a pretty standard usage of it.
"the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user"
Aug 21, 2026, 8:56 PM@richpuchalsky @futurebird is it possible that this is happening because the server they're on has a questionable reputation?
Unfortunately yes. Or maybe it's "fortunate" for example our server sauropods.win is too small to be on some whitelists, and was accidentally put on a few black lists and there are a few places that STILL have not changed this.
Though this does seem to sort itself out with time.
(please tell your friends to whitelist us, we are very respectable and only a little annoying... mostly about ants... OK that is literally just me I think)
@futurebird Some people don’t like ants and my therapist *insists* people are allowed to be wrong.
Weird.
Aug 21, 2026, 10:29 PM@futurebird well, you're not restricted on infosec.exchange
@futurebird It should be obvious, but I'll admit I was blind to it for a long time. I *always* forced my Facebook feed to display in chronological order -- I never *thought* about the effect of the random shuffle it wanted to show by default because I just never imagined anyone putting up with it. I just assumed everyone used it the same way I did.
And I don't know how many years now I've been hearing complaints about the "infinite scroll" and didn't get what was being talked about. Again, I only view stuff in reverse chronological order even if that isn't the default... and only thought about everyone else seeing things the same way so "infinite scroll" sounded like a criticism of a UI choice (not having to hit next page, next page, next page but just scroll...).
It just never occurred to me in all the years I've been hearing about it that other folks just put up with the random/algorithmic shuffling of their feeds. I never got what the big deal was because it never occurred to me that anyone was seeing algorithmically selected stuff and not slapping the algorithm's wrist every time it happened or that people weren't just viewing feeds of people and groups they actually chose to follow but being fed stuff they didn't ask for.
Also, influencers? I still don't know who/what/where they occur... NPR and everything I read says they're everywhere and unavoidable but I've just never seen any of the kind of stuff that is being described.
I guess they only exist in the random/promoted feeds I was never willing to use. I see folks who I follow and whoever the "influencers" are, they just aren't folks who's content I would find, read, watch, or follow. Meanwhile, NPR is talking about "The Influencer Economy" and such and I'm left asking "These... `influencers`.... are there any in the room with us now?".
Aug 21, 2026, 8:54 PM
@futurebird This is a really important topic, and a lack of dot-connection is a huge problem. Maybe people don't want to think how they could be manipulated. Thanks for explaining issues so clearly.
I think this has been shown a few times with facebook, and even their own internal research shows their interest in feed manipulation as a tool for social shaping.
I'm starting to wonder if the implications of this just went over some people's heads? Because when I realized that was what was going on? I nopped out of there so fast...
@futurebird this is why I quit using facebook.
In 2016 it was already so bad, and I assume it is worse now and probably harder to detect.
Aug 21, 2026, 8:55 PM
Aug 22, 2026, 6:03 AM@futurebird @llewelly I quit in 2016 over the election stuff that was **everywhere**.
And it wasn't the Trumpistas that drove me off. It was, of all things, the Bernie Bros who were going around to any woman who supported Hilary Clinton calling them "the c-word" for disagreeing with them and supporting a different candidate.
(There weren't a lot of Trumpistas in my feed or that would have been my signal to depart instead.)
Many of the "bernie bros" on Facebook in 2016 were a republican psyop and not real people. There was an massive and shockingly effective effort to target and divide democrats.
This was also done by promoting posts from the most divisive angry bernie supporters and putting them in front of more moderate dems, and putting the most annoying and out of touch moderate dem post in front of bernie supporters.
It was really manipulative and kind of worked by exploiting real issues.
This kind of manipulation is not illegal, and some of the people running platforms have said it is their goal.
This is the thing that blows my mind.
We have conspiracy theorists out there doffing their tinfoil hats while explaining that a secret cabal is controlling the weather via [mumble mumble] methods. Then you show them this and they just... turn and look past it like it's not there. This is an actual conspiracy that actually exists. It's known. It's proven. It's not really hidden because no one stops them so they don't have to hide it. And the conspiracy nuts just... don't see it? Their eyes go out of focus and they start talking about the government supposedly putting stuff in the water to change or control us instead because [mumble mumble.]
What the-
"If they were doing that I'd stop using facebook!"
I've had people say this to me. I think people really think that ... IDK it'd be more obvious. Or they don't see the power of things like omission.
For example? If anyone posts about "factory" and "pollution" then show their post to 1/10th as many people. Not to zero. That would be too noticeable. But just leave it out most of the time.
When people don't get reactions to a topic they stop posting about that topic.
@futurebird Yeah, there is a definite feedback loop effect. This is a very good point. In a way they even influence the influencers themselves using this methodology.
I guess I never thought of that aspect of it, but wow, they really do control every step of the way with this. Whether they realize it or not (but I suppose they must by now.) You're absolutely right.
@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird
You would think here in Canada after Facebook banned all news outlets
So Facebook was officially limited to rumors, gossip and lies
That people might get a clue
But nope, they rely on FB to talk to family and set up their social lives
Access to real news dropped to its lowest levels ever recorded
We’re headed towards a non-literate society up here beyond that controlled by these corporate filters
It’s wild
Aug 21, 2026, 7:24 PM@nazokiyoubinbou a main thesis for my understanding of humanity is that they eagerly embrace farfetched nonsense conspiracy theories *specifically because* they can’t cope with the real-world conspiracies that are happening out in the open, involving normal people who have names and addresses.
@Moss It drives me crazy because the real world things that they ignore are usually things they could easily fix by doing very very little. In the case of social media like Facebook and X manipulating their feeds, they can just simply not use them. That's it. Just... not use them... It's so simple that they can literally do nothing to achieve it. Heck, just complaining about it to a politician instead of Facebook can start the steps towards fixing some of the things they ignore.
So they go back to focusing on the things that have no real solutions because of some They™ that are beyond control just so they can rant and rave and shake a fist at the sky and I guess fool themselves into thinking this is doing something while actually doing nothing good at all.