How does "Shadow Ban" work? Instagram, VKontakte, YouTube, Facebook
A video about the power those who control social media wield to control information flows. The algorithm for "shadow banning" (a technology for blocking the distribution of objectionable content) is described.
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How does the "SMART FEED" of social media work? What is "SHADOW BAN"?
One of the main features of social media is the news feed. It collects posts from your friends and the communities you follow. Initially, all materials in the news feeds were arranged chronologically. In other words, users saw all posts based on the time they were published.
However, as large platforms developed, it became clear that chronologically displaying posts had serious drawbacks, the main one being the high risk of users missing important posts. This is due to the difference in the volume of content viewed and produced. The average Facebook or VKontakte user follows several hundred people and groups, which publish around 500 posts daily. Of these, they manage to view around 100 posts, while the rest are ignored.
This difference necessitated the implementation of algorithms that rank all posts not chronologically, but based on the "weight" of each post. The concept of "weight" implies a numerical value that is an integral indicator of many factors: the number of comments, likes, reads, length of the material, and so on. The number of factors taken into account can reach tens or even hundreds, some of which may be related to a specific user and their interests. But ultimately, all this data is summed or multiplied, creating a single final value reflecting the "weight of the material," which is used to rank posts in the news feed: materials with a higher weight rise to the top and receive priority user attention, while others are pushed far down, never to be seen.
This process and the emergence of "smart feeds" are a natural consequence of the development of social media. Facebook was the first to introduce this mechanism, followed by Instagram, VKontakte, and other platforms.
By understanding the mechanism behind the "smart feed" algorithm, we can describe the mechanism behind "shadow bans," which are designed to covertly block or limit the dissemination of certain information.
As you may recall, in the first part of this video, we described the algorithm for ranking posts in the user feed, including introducing the concept of "post weight," which serves as the basis for generating search results. Moreover, no platform ever discloses all the factors and coefficients that influence the final result, to prevent users from artificially inflating these metrics. This means that all the described algorithms operate "under the hood" of the system and are impossible for the average person to track. Only the platform owners, administrators, or programmers with access to the system are aware of them.
Accordingly, the "shadow ban" mechanism is extremely simple. An additional coefficient is applied to each individual post, channel, or community. It could be called, for example, a "trust level." This coefficient is set to 1 by default, but it can vary, for example, from one thousandth to one thousandth. This coefficient is manually controlled by those with access to the site's administrative section.
If you don't like a particular channel or community, you simply assign it a low trust level and change the coefficient from 1 to 0.1. As a result, the weight of all materials published on a channel with a low trust level is automatically reduced by a factor of ten, and its posts are naturally much less likely to be seen by subscribers. If, on the contrary, you want to promote information, you increase the "trust level" rather than decrease it, and the coefficient changes from 1 to 10. This means that the community's subscribers see its posts much more often and among the first in their news feed.
The main feature of a "shadow ban" is that the user or channel owner can never prove that such measures were taken against their account. After all, it's always possible to say that "readers simply lost interest in your content" or "you've become worse at posting."
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Tags: shadowban, Instagram, VKontakte, YouTube, Facebook, censorship, blocking, ban, social network, smart feed, social network, algorithm, channel, community, post, news.