Am I Shadowbanned on Twitter? How to Know and What to Do
If you are reading this, you may have had a particularly nasty argument on a Twitter feed, tested automation tools, or been a particularly annoying troll on Twitter. If you are noticing less activity on your page, fewer likes on your Tweets than usual, or if you’re sensing something strange happening to your account in general, you might have been shadowbanned on Twitter.
Shadowbanning is Twitter’s way of mitigating harmful or disruptive activity on its platform without completely suspending an account. It subtly limits the organic reach of your Twitter activity.
Why Do Shadow Bans Happen
Twitter has an array of strict rules to preserve the quality of its platform, and a number of methods to protect their users from unwanted or potentially bothersome or harmful encounters online.
Often many times, shadow bans may be implemented onto users before an account is suspended if the user is engaging in what Twitter deems inappropriate behavior on the web.
If your actions are not bad enough to warrant a bad, Twitter may instead opt for a shadowban to limit your visibility to other users if it deems your actions offensive to the platform’s rules and policy.
You will almost always be shadowbanned on Twitter for the following reasons:
- Spamming and rapid tweeting
- Automated Following, retweeting, and likes
- A low ratio of followers to followers
- Regular interactions with unfollowed accounts
- Being repeatedly blocked or reported
- Unverified account
- Negative, hateful, or harmful vocabulary
- Use of generic hashtags on a regular basis
- A lot of copied-and-pasted tweets
None of those actions are particularly malicious or harmful on their own per se, but they are indicators of misuse, and Twitter can only guess what your intentions are based on your actions on the platform.
The Twitter Shadow Ban Test
Shadowbanning is a sneaky way of limiting users’ organic reach on the platform, and often it is hard to notice unless you are particularly active on the site. There are a few ways to find out for sure if you are shadowbanned or not by taking the so-called ‘Shadowban Test.’
One easy way, use one of the following websites to check:
- Hisubway. online/shadowban/
- Shadowban.goliberty.org
- Shadowban.yuzurisa.com
On any of these websites, simply type your account name into the search bar, and they will inform you of whether you are shadowbanned or not.
Reversing a Twitter Shadowban
You can try appealing to Twitter’s support team at @TwitterSupport. If you feel like your shadowban is unjustified, sadly, there is no way to reverse it. The good news is that the ban expires.
What you can do during the wait time, which should be around 48 to 72 hours, is try to clear your account of anything that the platform could flag as inappropriate, armful, or disruptive.
- Keep a healthy following-to-follower ratio
- Don’t tweet too often; Twitter may flag you as a spammer
- Do not abuse the platform
- Avoid using automation
- Avoid involvement with paid shills
- Delete Negative engagement and activity
If you followed the above steps, you should be back to Tweet like a bird in no time – or 72 hours. Now that you are all set, you can tread more carefully and avoid getting shadowbanned on Twitter again.
Don’t violate the rules of the platform, don’t bed tempted into the digital equivalent of a bar fight with a troll, don’t spam other users with spam, and don’t Tweet like a bot.
Following this basic guideline should help you avoid attracting the attention of Twitter mindless algorithms, which are only out to enforce the rules that make Twitter a better place. To the best of their abilities, at least, but we all get swept up at some point.