Shadowbanning:
Art teacher Jennifer Bloomer has used Instagram to share activism-themed artwork and announce classes for eight years. Then last fall, while trying to promote a class called “Raising anti-racist kids through art,” her online megaphone stopped working.
It’s not that her account got suspended. Rather, she started to notice her likes dwindled and the number of people seeing her posts dropped by as much as 90 percent, according to her Instagram dashboard.
Bloomer, it appears, had been “shadowbanned,” a form of online censorship where you’re still allowed to speak, but hardly anyone gets to hear you. Even more maddening, no one tells you it’s happening.[“Shadowbanning is real: Here’s how you end up silenced by social media,” Geoffrey A. Fowler, WaPo]
Back when I was active in social media provision, single line BBSes only generated enough content for such a thing when they were networked together, such as Fido (I hypothesize they had enough traffic) or Citadel-86, and even that would come under the “only barely” column, so I have no administrative experience with such a tool. Moderation consisted of creating subject areas (“rooms”), deletion of messages, or, on rare occasion, expelling someone from the community.
On an unrelated note, this is a banyan.
But I can see shadowbanning’s utility and its dangers. Whether or not the social media providers can be forced to reveal more of their inner workings and other such data related to shadowbanning depends on whether they are behemoths relative to competitors or not, really. The government can mandate it, but then there’ll be litigation, with a fair to middlin’ chance that the law would be invalidated.
And this is a trust issue crossed with an unknown algorithm, isn’t it? Algorithms need not be fair, they can be grossly unfair, not to mention just out and out broken. Building that trust with your userbase is a big part of being a social media provider. But, on the other hand, forty years ago users just walked if they didn’t trust the provider. These days there are not nearly as many providers.
Will Mastodon step into that gap? I’ve heard it described as a ‘fed-iverse’, which sounds a lot like how the networks of BBSes worked, each having its own administrative policies. I wonder how that’s working out for them. I suppose I should investigate and see if Mastodon sites have local-only traffic as well network traffic, or if it’s all network.
