So What? Have I been shadow banned?

Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. How's it going, guys?

It's going. Doing well, doing well. On this week's episode, we're talking about shadow banning. Specifically, have I been shadow banned? Um, you know, this is this came out of our conversation on last week's live stream, which you can catch up on on our YouTube channel at TrustInsights.ai slash YouTube, where we talked about how different social media algorithms actually work.

And so one of the questions that comes up is have I been shadow banned? Um and so John, I know you've been doing some reading about shadow banning. And so can you just sort of summarize what it is before we get into figuring out whether or not it's happening? Yeah, sure. You know, I've been following the pulse pounding Twitter files, you know, which has been the most uh uh least exciting thing to go on in in the past four months here that we thought was gonna be cool.

But Shadow Banned actually goes way back to Reddit. If anybody's been around forever, Reddit back around 2012-ish somewhere. Um one of the lead guys there was just joking around that, you know, oh yeah, there's people that you know, we just shut your stuff off, and you know, you think everything's running normally, but you're actually not talking to anybody. You've been shadow banned, you know. And the idea is that there's no rules behind this.

Um, and so and that has you know, it's been kind of hijacked over the years. Like that original idea of that you would be doing stuff thinking you're in the community and just nobody ever sees or reads any of your stuff, has kind of been applied to everything uh as we get people who are complaining, like, well, we don't show up in the search results, or you know, we don't have uh and an easy way to think of it is it's yeah, there may be freedom of speech, but there's no freedom of reach. Like you're not entitled to get to everybody. But in most of the cases today, the users are being told that, hey, we're gonna stop showing your stuff, and it's not that they just don't exist without their own knowledge, but everybody does still call it shadow banning just because that's cool. How are we did he get it, Chris?

Is that straight on? It is, it is. The the challenge is to what John is saying, there's there's actually being acted against by the network, and then there's your your content just sucks and nobody likes it. Well, and I'm guessing uh that you know, Twitter or TikTok or whoever never says, hey, by the way, you've been shadow banned. Like it's just this illusion of, well, nobody's engaging with my stuff.

Like I see this on TikTok every once in a while, where somebody will post something which almost feels kind of clickbaity-of, I think I've been shadow banned. Please engage with my stuff to know if this is happening. And I'm like, but I I feel like you're you're manipulating me. You're making me feel bad because you're showing me cute videos of your puppy, but you're just looking for engagement numbers. Mm-hmm.

And it's interesting, um, not to drag a politics into this, but yesterday at the uh House testimony, uh, oversight committee testimony, um, one of the things that was discussed was former Twitter executives were were testifying about how Twitter worked. And in that testimony, we won't go into it uh the political side of it, but in that testimony, Twitter executives said, Oh, actually, it's the opposite. We have to, we had to make numerous exceptions to our our trust and safety rules to allow certain people who would otherwise have been, you know, uh penalized in some way to continue saying what they were wanted to say. And so it there's a lot of utility, you know, utilities and things out there that uh claim to help you detect it whether you're shadow banned or not. The Twitter rules, uh and this is true of all these social networks, the the the networks publish like what happens to you if you if you disobey the rules, right?

Some things like it says pretty clearly here, if you violate certain rules, your immediate permit suspension of the account, by you're gone, right? Others, like uh requiring to remove the offending tweets or temporary limiting your ability to post to new tweets. And again, check the terms of service for Instagram and TikTok and all these companies, they tell you here's what's gonna happen if you if you break the rules. And it's interesting, none of them mentioned we're gonna reduce your reach. Now, when Twitter had its little management change last October, um, the new owner did talk about oh, you know, uh we're gonna we're gonna tell you you've been shadow banned or not and stuff, but it it's it's noteworthy that that has not happened.

Um there has been no disclosure of that, even though new management's been in place now for what, four months, uh five months now. It's likely because it doesn't actually exist. So, you know, what's interesting too, though, is um I also see the term shadow ban a lot in Facebook groups where there's a moderator and someone will, you know, a member will say something like, I don't know why my poster is removed. You know, can the admin reach out to me to tell me? Um, or have I been shadow banned by the admin?

When you know, sometimes people accidentally hit delete, or you know, to what you guys are saying, your content wasn't that good and nobody cares. Yep, exactly. Um the other thing that this goes back to last week's show that people don't realize is that all of these social networks are these graph neural networks that we talked about last week, which means that your content and your being able to be seen varies from day to day based on your position within the network. So I'm gonna bring up a very simple simplified example. This is from the marketing props B2B form, one of our favorite conferences we were at last year.

Um, and what I've done is I've I've I've basically made a map of who is tweeting, you know, at or you know, uh about other people. The bigger your circle is, obviously, the more you get tweeted at. But the colors on here are essentially neighborhoods, right? These are the people that you associate with most. And so, you know, for example, we see me, Trust Insights, Katie Robert, and John Wall, all in that bright blue color, um, which pretty clearly indicates we talk to each other, right?

In a graph neural network, these associations are being monitored all the time. And that means that if it's going to recommend your content to somebody, guess who it's going to recommend it to? It's going to recommend it to the people who are nearest to you in the network who are the most likely to engage with it because the networks want engagement. They want you to stay glued to the feed. They want you to consume more ads.

Um, and so Nancy Harhoot over here in the bright orange, she's pretty far away from me in this example graph. So though if this was a social network, the algorithm probably would not recommend my content to Nancy all that often, right? Because she's so far away from me in engagement. Yeah, I know that's disappointing because Nancy is hardcore, you know, marketing stats and analytics. Of course, psychology slant on that, I guess.

So it's a it's a different crowd, and she just has her own community. Um but that doesn't mean that you've been shadow banned, it just means that mathematically you're not gonna show up in her feed. And so I guess I guess one of one of my first questions, you and I this might be a rhetorical question, is you know, are people essentially crying wolf when they're saying I've been shadow banned? The answer is uh a maybe. And here's the easiest way to answer that question: go to your own analytics, right?

So here's the Trust Insights uh analytics account, uh Twitter account, right? And look at your our engagement. And is our engagement unusual in in some fashion, right? Is it is it up or is it down? Is it you know what's going on with it?

Um you can uh export all this data and make like really big uh charts versions of this chart. Uh here's what trust insights looks like since 2018 when we started our Twitter account, our engagement rate. There are periods here where our engagement is definitely lower, periods where it's it's higher, but at no point does it go to zero. If I was if if we uh were truly you know shadow banned, you would expect to see um let me pull up a a different example. This is it the marketing over coffee Twitter account um you can see there's a great big gap here where there's no engagement at all now that's because we weren't tweeting John this is a very depressing graph overall well no no it I mean you can see it's not like you know last month you're talking 2010 to 20 uh eighteen my account quite honestly would look very similar I think I stood up my account in 2010 ish but didn't really start making it active until you know trust insights yeah that's totally us doing the placeholder there exactly so you can see pretty clearly that you if market over coffee account had been shadow banned for in this case years that's what it would look like you would say like oh look our our engagement is nothing no one's seeing our stuff we're we're you know we're we're just in a vacuum um here's Katie's account you know this is you did pull mine yeah um there's you could see you know nothing nothing nothing nothing selling 2018 is sweet start trust insights K is like all right fine I guess I got a tweet but again but this doesn't tell you maybe I was just posting really crappy content for 10 years.

That's I mean and that's the thing like that's what this is missing. Like we can make assumptions but it doesn't actually because good content is subjective. And so maybe all I was doing was live tweeting bad lifetime movies and nobody cared. Maybe it was just so terrible that nobody cared. Or maybe I was just telling people the kind of cereal I was eating for breakfast that morning.

Exactly. And so the this is what it would look like if your account had some kind of suppression on it, right? That those big gulfs of just no engagement whatsoever. Your contest not being seen, nobody knows it's there. Um and and and nothing's happening.

Now it's it's very interesting to look, you know, Katie's engagement rate has actually gone really, really well in the last four years. Uh so Katie is a champion social media manager. Woo! Really, yeah, you just trim that graph at 2018 and boom, yeah. Business.

I mean, but timing-wise, it makes sense because I really didn't activate my account until I had a reason to. Um, I mean, I have been, and I will quote myself saying, I hate social media. I'm not good at it, uh, but I understand its importance and its utility, and I will do it on behalf of the business. Exactly. So to answer the question, you know, have you been shadow banned?

Again, go into the tools that are provided to you and look at, you know, in this case, the Twitter for your own account will give you impression numbers, right? So uh here uh on Sunday the 22nd, you know, Trust Insights had 26 impressions. We had no tweets, so I mean that that makes logical sense. Um yeah, we had two tweets for 63 impressions on the 16th. We had um no tweets on Friday the 27th, but we had a lot of engagement because of other stuff was going on at the time.

Um so that's that's how to tell to tell. If you if you're tweeting and you're getting no impressions, yeah you you might have been shadow banned, which means that you don't have have any reach. But this is uh apologies, but this is just Twitter. Like TikTok doesn't have great analytics, LinkedIn doesn't have great analytics. And so, you know, how do you find out in a different context?

Like, so you know, Twitter has this analytics.twitter.com that uh you can tie to your account and find out pretty quickly. But what about other platforms? Like, are you still just guessing, or is there a way to find out? Oh, there's absolutely ways to find out, particularly if you are a creator on those platforms. So a lot of platforms have uh not just um individual uh analytics, but if you're a creator, you get extra stuff.

So, for example, here on LinkedIn, uh LinkedIn, if you turn on creator mode, now you can look at your content performance. So let's look at the last 90 days. Uh and this is impressions, right? So it is my content being shown to people. Um, and and you know, some sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

At no point does this graph flatline, you know, like uh a cardiac patient going into arrhythmia. It it's pretty clearly I'm I'm being seen. Uh you can look look at your engagements too to see if if your content is landing with people, right? So there are definitely periods of time here, like in November where my content just didn't land. Um was I shadow banned?

No, I was putting out content nobody liked. Well, okay, so it sounds like step one. Have I been shadow banned? Uh you need to look at your analytics from that particular platform to see, like, uh, did I put out crappy content, or have I really been getting, you know, zero reach and engagement, zero impressions, zero engagement, but I've been posting like crazy, that probably means that you've been shadow banned for whatever reason. However, if you're still seeing a little bit of uh activity, then that means that you probably need to double check if you're posting the right stuff to the right people.

Exactly. And and I think that it's it's that simple. Now I guess the next logical question is how do you if you if you're not getting engagement, regardless of being banned or not? Right. What do you do to fix it?

Oh, I mean, that's that's the that's the million-dollar question. Um, what I would do is I would start to run some tests of different kinds of content. Um, you know, I would say, like, do people engage more uh with videos, or do people engage more with polls? You know, if I keep it really simple to a basic question, like pineapple on pizza, our old standby, are people going to engage with it? And I feel like those kinds of tests will start to tell you.

I'm sure there's a way to look at your analytics to determine how to test, but my that's what my gut would tell me to do. John, how about you? Yeah, you can totally do the uh, you know, post a great picture of your dog, and boy, I think green is a terrible color. What do you think? You know, you can do stuff like that that just generates and spins all kinds of stuff.

Um, and uh jumping on other threads too, like reply uh boosting and stuff like that. Those are uh because I didn't realize like that's one thing that people actually get angry about is you can get banned from threads, you know, your replies don't show up, like everything is normal on the stuff you publish, but your applies don't show up, and that can go from um because I always wondered where that more reply button comes from. That's not saying, like, oh, we could only serve up 10 replies. It's you've seen the 10 best replies. If you want to see the crappy ones, click here and then we'll show you those.

But um, yeah, jumping, you know, the whole news jacking thing does work. It does. Let's go back to last week, too. Right. If we know that, say Andy Crestedina or Nancy Harhut or or Nick Westergaard are people that we want to be interacting with, right?

We want our stuff to be seen by them. We should be tagging them in our content, right? We should we should have an understanding of who our network is and then be interacting with them on the appropriate network. We should be creating content about them. Our friend um Carol does this with phenomenally with her illustrations.

She creates you know these animations that feature people on the graph that she wants to interact with more, be seen with by more, and so yeah, it's an it's an easy thing to what John was saying. Go into the social listening tool of your choice. Here's Talk Walker, for example. Choose the platform that you want to interact on. I'll choose Twitter here.

I chose as a search term uh Google Analytics, and I'm uh I set a window of the last seven days. Here's the most engaged tweets on on Google Analytics in the last seven days. What should we do? Retweet, reply, and like, right? That's it's like comment share.

That's that's the the magic formula for engagement. And a certain percentage of people, because people are predictable, will naturally like say, Hey, thanks for retweeting me or whatever. And guess what? Now you've created that connection in the network graph to those nodes. Mm-hmm.

Well, and it's funny because in the pre-show, we were talking about how I never see uh Chris's posts in my Twitter feed. Uh, but I also don't engage with Chris Chris's posts on Twitter, primarily because we work together and I talk to him every day. I don't also feel the need to then engage with his social media. But if we were seeing that my doing so would help with my engagement, his engagement, you know, then it would be something that you know we would start doing. But I think overall, like Chris and I don't engage with each other's posts on social media purely because we talk to each other all day long, anyway.

Yep, exactly. And so if I want to see more of Katie, guess what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna hit retweet and just go all the way down the stack here. Uh anything that Katie's sharing. Right.

Doesn't even know what he's replying to. Have no idea every article. Oh, that's a oopsie. It's true that that did happen. And now what are we doing?

We are feeding the network, right? We are telling the network this person is important, this media is important. I want to see more of it. Um, some networks will even let you specify that. Um, Instagram and Facebook in particular say, uh, you know, show these people first.

Um, and so if there are if you're in sales, uh if you're in a business development, guess what? Your top 50 prospects should be in that list, right? And I always want to see John Wall's posts first, and that way that way I remember like, comment, share everything that John puts out that within reason. Like if it's a picture of like John's you know plumbing work over the weekend, I'm like, I don't know if I want to like that toilet. But well and so you know Facebook does that too.

And so it will ask you do you want to see more or less posts like this or more or less from this person. And so I think what we're coming to is you know you you know the term shadow banned like anything else is sort of tossed around very loosely without a really good understanding of what it really means. And so I think that you know posters and creators on social media will use it in a way to sort of like manipulation's the wrong word but like they'll sort of use it to try to get more engagement like hey you know I think I've been shadow banned can you engage with this to see if it's really true. And they're probably just trying to be like hey here's a great way to get people to pay attention or you know so you really don't really know. So I would say you know buyer beware if you see people posting like that they may just be looking to boost their numbers.

Someone who's really shadow banned you wouldn't see their post period and so that's sort of like the gut check of well they're saying they've been shadow banned but I'm still seeing their stuff. Exactly social networks and this is the part that drives me crazy about people social networks do not have an incentive to have quiet users. They have an incentive to have loud users noisy people, controversial people, because that's what keeps people coming back, and that's what lets them show more ads, right? If nobody's posting, then you have less inventory to show ads on with you know, I uh John was pointing out before the show there, this this rumor that Twitter's going to limit people who are not your verified members to seven tweets a day. That is not in Twitter's economic interest to make money, right?

Twitter wants you to be verbose because A, that's how you serve aventure, and B, we know from the uh new management's tweets that they measure activity, like hey, we had more tweets than ever, right? You know, very simplistic uh measures, but it tells you where that person's head is. Um, and a doctor in a flesh that will help you find it. But in terms of true volume, like that's what they care about, is we want more and more and more. So there it makes no even basic business sense to say, yeah, let's let's completely restrict people who are not paying so that we can have less activity, less advent inventory, and be able to sell less fewer ads.

So, question, because I can sort of see how these dots could be connected, but I don't know if they're the right dots to connect. Um, is shadow banning something that only exists on a social media platform? So, for example, um, could someone say, I think my blog is being shadow banned from Google because it doesn't show up in search. People can make that claim. But is that really, but obviously that's not really what's happening, it's that it's not optimized correctly, it's not answering a useful question.

There's no Google doesn't see that there's any value to showing this. Like, is that Google's version of shadow banning? In a sense, like we know that PageRank, which is was the original algorithm from you know 1999, was a graph network, right? That it literally was this. The number of links going into a site um indicate that you know that site has validity.

If you're out there musing about you know whatever and shouting it to ether and you've got your blog and no one links to it, gosh, I can't imagine why Google wouldn't show that in the search results, right? Because nobody thinks you're credible. And again, I know we're going to talk about this on an upcoming episode. Um when you look at the search quality rating guidelines that Google puts out and says, you know, here's what quality content looks like. Here's the you know how we we make a lot of these judgments.

The machine learning models that power these things take into account those networks. And if if you are, you know, like in this example, this graph. If you're way out here in the you know in the in the suburbs and nobody's talking about you, you don't have from a mechanistic perspective, you don't have expertise, you don't have experience, you don't have authority, you don't have trustworthiness. Are you shadow banned? I mean, I guess in the sense that Google does not think you're credible and therefore is not going to show your stuff.

But is it because Google hates you? No, it's because you're not doing what Google's told you to do. And so I feel like we keep coming back to the same action of number one, you need to understand the rules and regulations of the platform that you're trying to post on, whether that be a search engine or a social media platform, or probably even uh a private community where you can be muted or banned. So, number one, make sure you're following the guidelines and you're playing the game, following someone else's rules, and number two, just post good content. Post content that your audience cares about and you shouldn't have an issue.

Um, and then if you are for some reason shadow banned, um, then the way to get yourself out of shadow banning purgatory is to start to engage with people that you care about that you want in your network. So if I was shadow banned on Twitter, I would then look to Chris your account and John your account and be like, hey guys, I'm gonna start, you know, reengaging, to start sharing and you know, commenting and liking so that I can get myself out of purgatory. And there's a and number three is network. Network with other people, do stuff that helps validate you. So for example, um this whole warrior nun thing that I uh you know part of.

What happens when when you're a part of a group? Look at how many people are are tagging me into stuff that I'm not even posting. It's not I'm not even publishing this stuff. I just got tagged into it. And suddenly you have all these mentions, all these network connections, hundreds of them a day.

At this point, I could probably do pretty much anything that was not an outright violation of Schwarter's rules, and my account would be fine because you have all these incoming signals saying, hey, this account is super valid because everybody's referencing it. There's a lot of activity within the network that is that are positive signals. So you it to what you're saying, K, good content, yeah, is important, but so is the network of people to support you. And this is why we keep emphasizing over and over again your community is so vital. If you're if you don't have as a brand, as a marketer, if you do not have a community, you are a hosed because you will be that little dot on the outside yelling into the ether, right?

You will not be marketing profs, you will not be Lee Odin, you will not be Katie Robert on the network because no one's talking about you. Build that community, right? You know, think about the the analytics from marketers Slack group, right? Which we have over uh here. It's 3,000 people.

What happens when we post a piece of content to that? What happens when we ask people to tweet about it? What happens when we ask people to share it? We we create that authority, these signals in these algorithms that this is valid. And the more that we can uh leverage our community and have our community leverage us and participate in their stuff, the better we all do.

But yeah, and I know it don't goes totally against literally everything I believe in, but you can't do it alone, right? You cannot do marketing alone anymore. Yeah, because the way these algorithms work, they are driven by people's behavior, a crowd's behavior, and you need a crowd. Good luck, Chris. I know how much of a people person you are.

I I know it's I'm I'm delighted. I think you should keep me around a little longer. Another part of this too, though, is how mo especially on the search side, like they don't have to do shadow banning because they just create enough gates to the content. You know, you your content needs to basically score high enough to be shown and shared, right? If your stuff is junk, you're not going to accumulate the points.

Whereas the idea with the shadow ban is at some point a finger gets put on the scale and is like, okay, no, your content is doing well enough, but we're going to throttle it and not show it. But and so there's big two big pieces of that. One is just the timeout box. We see that used all the time of just like, okay, for two weeks you can't post and your stuff's not seen for two weeks. Uh, but then the other one is to actually um you know get kicked off the platform or be sent home and you know not be able to come back on.

And unfortunately, like both of those require human intervention, and that's why we see you know the networks doing such a poor job of it, and they basically fall back to this point of well, it we can't guarantee it's not going to be seen by anyone, like it's gonna go out, and the people that follow them and want to see that stuff will still see it, but we can at least try and throttle the spread to the rest of the world. But is there anything out there as far as you know, once you've been thrown in the penalty box for something? I mean, basically you can appeal and say reinstate my account if it's reinstated, or if you're locked out for two weeks, you just have to sit and watch the clock. Is there anything else that can really be done on any of the networks? It depends on the network.

Um, you know, think about the OG shadow ban. The OG shadow ban is you're a spammer and we're not gonna deliver your email, right? So you can send all the email you want, but uh you're on every black list that there is. Uh so you basically have to burn your server down and then buy a new one because you're you're never getting your email delivered again. Um, it's all algorithmic.

So it to my knowledge, anything that's using a graph network, particularly a temporal graph network, which you talked about last week, over time, those embeddings that are time-based fade away, right? It's like a half-life, it's like a decay. Uh, eventually, those thresholds uh raise up and you might start getting the scene again. The express way out of that is to the best of your possibility, you know, make sure that you've got the that insurance policy of a strong network of people that are constantly engaging with your stuff so that you keep those signals, the you keep the the volume of positive signals far above any negative signals. Um, and and you stay ahead of the algorithm.

Well, I mean, I think I think that kind of covers that. I mean, the the big takeaways are you can look at your analytics to understand if you've been shadow banned. Um, you know, if there's no reach, if there's no engagement, if there were no impressions to the things that you're posting, uh, you may have been shadow banned. And then, you know, the way to start to get out of that is to uh start to engage with other posts. Like you posting while you're shadow banned, it's not going to change anything.

You engaging, you liking uh you resharing will help get you uh out of that purgatory place. And also just make sure you didn't violate the regulations of whatever platform you've been banned on. Exactly. And you know, build your network in whatever format and wherever it is, whether it's uh Slack community, whether it's your email list, whether it's on multiple social networks, build that community of people around you because that's what will provide the positive signals to algorithms to let you back in. So if you don't have that community, it's going to be a lot harder.

Um that's that's the way it is. If you look at Twitter, for example, you look at some of the people who are posting stuff, you're like, wow, that's really not okay. But you look at the metrics on their posts, you know, hundreds of thousands of likes and tens of thousands of retweets, like, oh well, clearly, they have their network, and that network acts as uh you know a protection against their account just getting canned, even though they're you know saying ridiculous things like the earth is square and flat instead of round and a sphere, like well apparently you've got enough people to agree with you that that um the the logic of the network of the algorithm overrules basic common sense in reality. Well, you can't fix stupid. You sure can't, but you can monetize the daylights out of it.

Thanks for tuning in this week. We will see you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI Podcast.

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