Suddenly you notice that none of your social media activity seems to be showing up at all. Its like you dont even exist on the site Weird!

Is it a bug? Every website suffers from them sometimes, and the interactive features can often be the first to go haywire. Server maintenance could also be the culprit.

But another possibility is that you might have been shadowbanned (previously called ghost banned).

Accounts that are shadowbanned are put into a kind of invisible mode. In other words, they become a shadow that no one can see.

In this post, well talk more about what exactly shadowbanning is, and how you can tell if it happened to you.

Shadowbanning is when your posts or activity dont show up on a site, but you havent received an official ban or notification.

Its a way to let spammers continue to spam without anyone else in the community (or outside of it) seeing what they do.

That way, other social media users dont suffer from spam because they cant see it. The spammer wont immediately start to look for ways to get around the ban, because they dont even realize theyve been banned.

Now, all of this might sound a little odd or shady. Since many websites and apps deny that they shadowban, theres no way to know for sure that its happened.

If you suspect a shadowban, a change in the websites search or newsfeed algorithm might actually be to blame. And since the algorithms are the property of social media companies, its not in their best interest to reveal everything about them publicly.

Regardless of whether youve been penalized deliberately or accidentally, the effect is still the same no one can see your posts.

Theres no way of getting a full list of sites that shadowban people, since the practice isnt entirely out in the open.

However, shadowbanninghas been reported beforeunder certain circumstances, on sites and apps likeFacebook, Instagram, andTikTok, among others.

Respondents to a survey called Posting Into the Voidreported four general types of shadowbans:

Heres how to tell if youve been shadowbanned on some popular social media sites:

Does Twitter actually shadowban people? Well, yes and no.

In a blog post, Twitter claimed that they dont deliberately make peoples content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, and they certainly dont shadowban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

However, they did say they rank tweets and search results to address bad-faith actors. Basically, if Twitter thinks youre a spammer or a troll, its algorithm will penalize your content.

Twitter lists these as some of the factors they use to tell if youre a bad-faith actor or not:

To avoid getting shadowbanned on Twitter, you should confirm your email address and upload a profile picture.

Dont spam people and dont be overly promotional. If youre trying to sell a product or service and are posting too much, other users might block your content, causing a shadowban on your account.

You should also try to avoid trolling, getting into online arguments, or being too confrontational in your posts and comments. This can lead people to mute or block you.

Theres no way to tell for sure if youve been shadowbanned on Twitter. However, you could try using the site Shadowban.eu, which claims to be able to detect a shadowban.

How frustrating is it to work hard atbuilding up an Instagram following, only to see that your posts suddenly arent showing up?

Like with Twitter, Instagrams CEO has publicly claimed thatshadowbanning is not a thing, but aswith Twitter, thats not entirely true.

While youpersonally might not be being shadowbanned, the algorithm could still be hiding your posts.

Instagrams algorithm is designed to remove certain content. Namely, the algorithmpenalizes content that Instagram considers inappropriate, even if the content doesnt go against the appsCommunity Guidelines.

Specifically, they mention sexually-suggestive content. According to their Community Guidelines, spammy content and content associated with illegal activity or violence is also a no-go.

Instagram prefers photos or videos that are appropriate for a diverse audience so less family-friendly content may be at risk of a shadowban.

Theres no surefire way to tell if youve been shadowbanned on Instagram, but there are sites that say they can test it. Triberris one option.

Shadowbanning onRedditis a bit different from shadowbanning on other social media sites. Up until 2015, Reddit openly shadowbanned users who broke the sites rules by hiding their posts.

Reddit then announcedthat the shadowbanning system had been replaced with an account suspension system. Basically,some Reddit staff thoughtthat the shadowban tool had been useful for dealing with bots, but that banning real human users without telling them what they did wrong was unfair.

However, the site appears to still occasionally be using shadowbans, with ther/ShadowBan subredditstill active.

According to theirofficial content policy, Reddit may enforce their rules by removal of privileges from, or adding restrictions to, accounts, and also by removal of content, among other methods.

Of course, to avoid getting shadowbanned on Reddit, youll need to follow their rules. But one tricky thing about that is that the rules on Reddit actually depend on the subreddit you are submitting to.

Youll want to read and comment a lot first before submitting your own links. Watch how people react to various types of submissions within a specific subreddit, and then act accordingly.

You can also check out thisunofficial guide on how to avoid being shadowbanned. Some key points:

To find out if youre shadowbanned on Reddit, make a post in the r/ShadowBan subreddit. A bot will respond to you, letting you know if youre shadowbanned.

Even if youre not, the bot will tell you which posts of yours have been removed recently (if any).

You could also use a third-party tool, likeAm I Shadowbanned?

TikTok is a popular social network for sharing short videos. Unfortunately, you can get shadowbanned there too (kind of).

While theres no official mention of the term shadowban in TikToks Community Guidelines, like other social media networks, TikTok uses algorithms to privilege certain content. If you get on the wrong side of the algorithm, fewer people might see the content you post.

To have more people see your content and avoid penalties, try to follow best practices for TikToks recommendation algorithm, and always follow the Community Guidelines.

Stay away from illegal material, violence, hate speech, spam, and other similar topics.

To check if youve been shadowbannedon TikTok, look at your pageviews and For You page statistics. You can also use a hashtag and see if your post shows up under that hashtag.

Facebook calls its content moderation policy remove, reduce, and inform.

Basically, content that violates Facebooks Community Standardswill be removed from the site, while other undesirable content (like misleading information) may be less visible on Facebook or have a warning label placed on it.

If Facebook is consistently reducing your content, that could be considered a type of shadowban.

The main thing you can do to trigger a shadowban on Facebook is to share links to fake or misleading information. Content on the site is checked by independent fact-checkingorganizations.

Facebook also penalizes links from websitesthat its algorithm considers clickbait. Low-authority websiteswithout a lot of inbound and outbound links that generate a lot of clicks on Facebook may be considered clickbait.

Facebook groups where a lot of misleading links and clickbait are frequently shared may be shadowbanned.

If youre worried your personal page, business page, or group might have been shadowbanned on Facebook, check for a change in engagement levels on your recent posts.

While people dont often think about getting shadowbanned on LinkedIn, its possible for your contents reach to be throttled there.

Like other social media sites, LinkedIn has Community Policiesthat all members need to follow to avoid problems.

Since LinkedIn is a professional site, its content policies are even stricter than other platforms. Not only should your content be safe, legal, and appropriate, it has to be professional as well.

Although LinkedIn is obviously a place for career growth and self-promotion, spamming people is still a no-go.

Youll need to respect others privacy and intellectual property. You should also avoid harassment or unwanted romantic advances towards other members.

If you violate LinkedIns policies, they may limit the visibility of certain content, or remove it entirely.

That said, the LinkedIn algorithm is pretty complicated. Even if your content is perfectly professional and high-quality, it might still not be getting the reach you want.

Engagement and relevanceare the top two factors to keep in mind when creating content for LinkedIn.

While its not exactly a social network, its definitely still a site where people go to learn and share content. Can you be shadowbanned from YouTube?

Well, YouTube shadowbanninghas been in the newsbecause of popular creator PewDiePie. According to his fans, the Swedish videogame YouTubers channel was penalized in YouTube search.

YouTubes official response was thatit doesnt shadowban channels, but that some videos might be flagged and need to be reviewed before they show up in search.

Inan interview with Polygon, they said they were currently working on fixing the issue.

Different social networks have their own opinions on what type of violations merit a shadowban. However, we can definitely see some general trends that are worth noting.

How to not get shadowbanned

Shadowbanning is when your posts or activity dont show up, but you havent received an official ban or notification.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others.

Follow the sites terms of service, dont post spam or links that arent allowed, dont post illegal content, and always treat others with kindness.

This depends on each site. For some, its just a period of time you have to wait, while with others you have to ask customer service. Some users get permanently shadowbanned as well.

You may not have any idea you are being shadowbanned. At least not at first though over time, you may begin to suspect it.

What you should do to protect yourself is to be careful that what you post isnt against the terms and conditions of the site or app. Also, try to avoidspamming content, starting fights with and trolling other users, or posting things that might be considered inappropriate.

A shadowban can be frustrating, especially if you dont feel like you deserve one. Maybe you dont agree with the social media algorithm about what is or isnt inappropriate, or maybe you think you werehaving a constructive debatewhile the algorithm thinks you were being a troll.

However, hopefully the tips in this guide can help you avoid being shadowbanned in the future, so your content can get better engagement.

What other ways can help people know if theyve been shadowbanned? Let us know in the comments.

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What is Shadow Banning (and How to Fix It) - Neil Patel

Call of Duty: Warzone has been plagued by hackers and cheaters since its release, however theyve implemented the shadow ban system to solve this issue.

Despite Ravens best efforts, Call of Dutys online battle royale, Warzone, continues to be overrun by hackers and cheaters.

With a series of hacks seeing mischievous players crashing peoples games (especially streamers), the devs need to do something soon.

Enter shadow banning, the system thats devised purely to stop rule breaking players in their tracks. Heres everything you need to know about this type of punishment.

If youve been hit with a shadow ban, Raven have decided that your account is associated with some form of illegitimate activity.

Shadow bans are given to Warzone players who have been hacking or cheating. Their main purpose is to group all of the punished players in the one lobby so that theyre forced to play together instead of against unsuspecting others.

As you can imagine, this is an absolute nightmare of a lobby to play in, so while you dont want one of these bans on your own account, you can take some satisfaction from the fact that getting a shadow ban is hellish for cheaters.

While theres no obvious way to tell if youve been shadow banned, here are a few of the things you should look out for if youve noticed some changes in your account.

Normally accidental bans are lifted after 7 to 14 days, but if youre sick of getting thrown into the lions den you can dispute the matter with Activision using this link.

So thats everything you need to know about shadow bans in Call of Duty: Warzone.

If you want to be on top of all the latest news, ensure that youre following our dedicated CoD Twitter account!

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What is shadow banning in Warzone? How to find out if you ...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court was so eager to nullify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent securing the right to abortion, that it didnt even wait for oral arguments.

Instead, in the middle of the night, five of the high courts conservatives issued a brief, unsigned order allowing a Texas law that bans abortion at six weeks. The law also gives private citizens the authority to sue anyone who knowingly aids or abets an abortion and rewards them with $10,000 if successful, essentially placing a bounty on anyone wishing to end a pregnancy, and anyone who might help them. Texas is now rewarding residents who snitch to the state on the most intimate details of other peoples lives.

Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a States enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.

Also remarkable was that the Supreme Court acted through its shadow docket, the decisions the justices make regarding emergency appeals such as death-penalty cases. Under normal procedure, cases take time to work their way through the lower courts, and are received at the Supreme Court with extensive records, briefs, and oral arguments. Ideally, this allows the justices to ensure that their hugely consequential decisions are properly informed and made as carefully as possible, weighing all the relevant legal and constitutional issues. But there are some circumstances in which the Court needs to act quickly to prevent some imminent or irreversible harm. Theres nothing inherently sinister about that. The shadow docket, though, now resembles a venue where the conservative legal movement can get speedy service from its friends on the Court.

Mary Ziegler: The deviousness of Texass new abortion law

Over the past few years, the cases on the shadow docket have risen in significance, with the justices quietly making major changes to American law without the scrutiny or attention that comes with holding oral arguments or writing major opinions. Trump-administration attorneys found the Courts conservative majority delighted to allow many of their most controversial policies to go forward. Under President Joe Biden, by contrast, the conservative justices have acted rapidly to block administration decisions, or to force Trump-era policies to remain in place.

The term shadow is meant to evoke the understanding that what the Court is doing is not the way that decision making on an ordinary merits docket would happen, says Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU who clerked for Sotomayor while she was a federal judge. I think its clear that it has become a shadowy way to effect substantive decisions in cases where the Court, in the light of day, would be more reluctant to move aggressively.

The shadow docket has been a tremendously successful venue for the right. Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has closely followed the shadow docket, counts at least 41 requests for emergency relief submitted to the Court from the Trump administration, compared with eight under the Obama and Bush administrations combined. And he counts only four occasions during the Trump administration on which the Court denied the governments request outright. That deference has not continued into the Biden administration.

During the Trump administration, it was on the shadow docket that basically all of Trumps controversial immigration policies affecting millions of people were allowed to go into effect, including the travel ban, Vladeck told me. During the Biden administration perhaps the biggest shadow-docket ruling so far was the ruling last week that froze and effectively killed the CDCs revised eviction moratorium.

Under Trump, the justices allowed policies such as the administrations travel ban targeted at mostly Muslim nations, its prohibition against trans people serving in the military, and its restrictions on asylum to go into effect. Under Biden, they have barred the administrations attempt to prevent evictions because of the coronavirus pandemic and accepted a lower-court ruling demanding that the White House reimpose the controversial Trump-era Remain in Mexico policy, which forced migrants into precarious conditions in dangerous Mexican border cities where thousands became victims of kidnappings, rapes and extortion, according to The Washington Post. The decision compels the Biden administration to renegotiate an agreement with a foreign country reached during a prior administration; deference to the presidents constitutional authority to set foreign policy, which the justices had memorably cited in Trump-era cases, was suddenly absent.

What is so troubling about this trend is its continuing acceleration, not in volume, but in quality, Vladeck said. The Court seems increasingly untroubled by deciding big questions that affect lots of people this way. Having a conservative-dominated tribunal determine such questions, however, is an ideal arrangement for a party that has not won a majority of the votes in a presidential election since Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, and that sees the popular majorities that vote against it as composed of illegitimate semi-citizens who have no right to govern.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court is headed back to the 19th century

The shadow docket has begun to look less like a place for emergency cases than one where the Republican-appointed justices can implement their preferred policies without having to go through the tedious formalities of following legal procedure, developing arguments consistent with precedent, or withstanding public scrutiny. And so after initially allowing the Texas law banning abortion before most women know they are actually pregnant to go into effect, five conservative justices told Republican-controlled states they could disregard Roe while insisting that wasnt what they were doing at all.

Instead, the justices in the majority argued in their unsigned opinion that because the case presented complex and novel antecedent procedural questions, their hands were tied. This is ludicrously dishonest. If Texas passed a law granting $10,000 bounties to private citizens if they sued anyone who held or enabled an indoor church service during the pandemic, the Courts conservative wing would not feign confusion about whether the constitutional right to freedom of worship had been violated because of the supposed novelty of the scheme.

This ruling is less a description of a complex legal challenge than a road map. As Mary Ziegler writes, the Texas law was strategically designed to evade legal restrictions, and the majority read the script that was handed to it. Republican-run legislatures now know that they can pass such laws and the Supreme Court will pretend to be unable to block them.

Among the Republican appointees, only Chief Justice John Roberts had enough respect for the rights purported doctrines of judicial minimalism to vote to wait for the case to reach the high court through normal procedural channels. Ironically, though, the unsigned majority decision reflects a careful study of Robertss years of successfully managing the Courts reputation. The decision does not say Roe is hereby overruled, but it tells states exactly how they can effectively ban abortion if they want to. In that, it echoes Robertss own tendency to hide his preferred outcomes behind legal technicalities, the better to mime fidelity to constitutional principle.

Mary Ziegler: The abortion fight has never been about just Roe v. Wade

Although the Court denies the applicants request for emergency relief today, the Courts order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue, Roberts wrote in his dissent. But because five justices allowed the law to go into effectand by implication, laws in any other state that wishes to emulate TexasRoe has been neutralized. The only question is whether that decision is temporary, and whether the Court will eventually enact any restraints on the particular legal scheme Texas has pioneered.

I dont think those in the reproductive-rights community who are sounding the alarm that [the Court] really effectively overruled Roe in Texas are being hyperbolic, Murray told me yesterday, prior to the Courts written opinion. The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States allows a law that patently contradicts its own statements about the right to an abortion to go into effect is essentially the Court signaling that it does not care about this right and it does not think this right should exist.

Neutralizing Roe through normal channels would have taken time, and the Supreme Courts conservatives did not want to wait. Thanks to the shadow docket, they didnt have to. Five conservative justices invalidated the constitutional right to an abortion simply because they could, because they felt like it, and because they dont believe anyone can stop them.

Read more:

The Supreme Court Guts Roe by Shadow Docket - The Atlantic

What is shadowbanning?

When someone is shadowbanned, their posts on that platform are virtually invisible to everyone but themselves. Their presence on that platform is limited, and their voice effectively suppressed. If were being technical, the patents complete abstract reads:

Users of social networking system are provided with user interface elements permitting the user to post comments on pages within the social networking system. Pages may be provided for any non-user entity, including for example, pages for businesses, products, concepts, etc. Embodiments provided herein permit page moderators to ban certain content from being displayed on a page. For example, the social networking system may receive a list of proscribed content and block comments containing the proscribed content by reducing the distribution of those comments to other viewing users. However, the social networking system may display the blocked content to the commenting user such that the commenting user is not made aware that his or her comment was blocked, thereby providing fewer incentives to the commenting user to spam the page or attempt to circumvent the social networking system filters.

The primary message that their patent is sending is that Facebook reserves the right to moderate what content people see. Proscribed means prohibited or forbidden by law. So, if Facebook sees proscribed content, it may limit the visibility of such content. This content is displayed only to the sharing user, and in many cases, they wont be aware that theyve been shadowbanned. Facebook does this to prevent the user from spamming the page and finding loopholes in the filtering system.

The main purpose of shadowbanning is supposedly to keep feeds clean and social media users happy. Facebook does not want people spreading content that comes off as spammy, or worse, offensive.

Because Facebook does not inform you of this shadowban, you wont really know if youre experiencing it. You could go about your day, routinely posting and sharing content, and you could not notice anything wrong. However, the telltale symptom of a shadowban is a dip in engagements. Youll see that your posts or comments arent getting as many reactions or replies as they usually would. Whereas your posts would normally reach 1,000 interactions, you find that youre struggling to reach 50.

Another way to tell if youve been shadowbanned is to use another friends account to see if your posts show up on their feed. Shadowbans will typically hide these posts from other people, and youll have to visit the banned persons profile to view these posts.

Anyone. No matter who you are or how many friends and followers you have, you can receive the Facebook shadowban. Legit accounts following rules could be just as much at risk as a malicious account abusing the platform. Shadowbanning is still a work in progress, so you can expect to have some outliers here and there. Facebook apparently uses this to enhance the overall customer experience, so you shouldnt take it personally. In some cases, the platform may have committed a simple mistake in banning you even when youve done nothing wrong.

A shadowban can be detrimental for businesses relying on Facebook as their primary platform for conducting transactions. But for personal accounts, this may not be as severe. There are a few things you can do to remedy this situation.

If you suspect youve been shadowbanned by Facebook, there are some things you can do to smooth this problem over.

Here are some things you can practice to reduce your odds of receiving a Facebook shadowban:

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How to Tell If Your Content Is Being "Shadow Banned" on ...

Late Wednesday night, there was finally the first snippet of good news this year in the never-ending abortion wars.U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked Texas' near-total ban on abortions.The injunction was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Texas.Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ban on all abortions two weeks after a missed period which are 9out of 10 cases "clearly unconstitutional."

Signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, Texas' abortion bansets up a bounty hunter systemthatallowsany random stranger to claim sovereignty over a woman's body and sue anyone who helped her abort a pregnancy. In his 113-page decision a searing and angrybreath of fresh air for those Americans who believe women are people Judge Pitmancalled the law an "unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right."

Thisdecision wasn't just a rebuke to the misogynist Texas legislators who passed this law, but to the Supreme Court that upheld it.

Without hearing arguments, the highest court in the nation allowed Texas' ban to go into effect through an unsigned "shadow docket"decision short enough to be written on a postcard. So Pitman put in the work that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court wouldn't do. He listened to arguments, he examined the evidence, and he wrote a decision painstakingly explaining his reasoning. It turns out that banning abortion through the back door is not as easy as Republicans and the partisan hacks they installed on the Supreme Court thought it would be.

And yes, conservatives clearly thought they could quietly overturn Roe v. Wade without the public noticing.

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The entire Texas abortion ban was built on a cloak-and-daggers strategy. The law itself was an effort to get around the problem of the news coverage that flows from clinics and reproductive rights suing the state for passing abortion bans. The "shadow docket" move was more of the same, allowing the Supreme Court to overturn Roe without coming right out and saying that's what they did. As soon as the non-decision decision came down, the conservative propagandists fanned out, insisting that the Supreme Court ruling wasn't really a Roe overturnbut merely a "procedural ruling" that causes "no harm."

But as Pitman's decision demonstrates, that's a flat-out lie.

His ruling cites numerous examples of harm that the Supreme Court ignored in issuing its paragraph-length decision, including to "a Texas minor who had been raped by a family member" and had to drive eight hours for care, and "another woman from Texas who had been raped" and struggled "to take extra time off from work to make the trip to Oklahoma, as well as find childcare for her children."

In one sense, this nonsense about how this is merely a "procedural" decision as if people weren't going to noticethat 90% of abortions were banned in Texas worked. Every time I tune into a cable news show discussion about abortion and the courts, the discussion is over "if" the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the "future," with little acknowledgment that they already did it through the back door. While the Supreme Court is hearing a more formal case in December Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health that will allow them to legalize abortion bans nationwide,the damage has already been done. And let's face it, even when they do issue a more extensive ruling, they're going to be deceptive about itand try to find some legal reasoning that allows abortion to be banned without coming right out and saying they're overturning Roe.

The reason conservatives want so much camouflage for their Roe overturn is not mysterious.Abortion rights are very popular, and there's a real chance thiscould hurt Republicans electorally. Sexism and still-lingering American puritanism may cause all sorts of chaos in polling people's moral judgments on abortion, but when people are asked point-blank about the right to get one, around three-quarterswant it to stay put. Even 40% of people who call themselves "pro-life" want the right to abortion, because even they know, on some level, that being against abortion is easy until you need one.

So really, it should be no surprise that approvalof the Supreme Court has plummeted to a new low of 40%, down from 58% a mere year ago. Even more detailed polling shows that skepticism of the court has dramatically increased, with more Americans agreeing that Congress should do something to reinthe court in or abolish it altogether.Somehow, however, conservatives seem to be shocked that their efforts to ban abortion under the cover of darkness have not gone unnoticed.

The conservative justices behind the shadow docket abortion ban, for instance, have becomeincredibly whiny in the face of all the completely earned accusations that they are sleazy fundamentalists who are too cowardly to own their rejection of law and custom in their frenzied efforts to turn the U.S. into Gilead. In the past month alone, Amy Coney Barrett gave a protest-too-much speech denying she and other conservative justices are "partisan hacks," Samuel Alito blamed the media and not his own actions for people disliking him, and Clarence Thomas accused peopleof wanting to destroy "our institutions because they don't give us what we want, when we want it," seemingly talking to a bunch of toddlers wanting candy, rather than citizens demanding basic human rights.

Even the Texas anti-choice activists behind this ban seem to be caught flat-footed. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Atlantic, "abortion opponents are claiming to be surprised that the law is being used as writtenand are perhaps realizing, belatedly, that their vigilante strategy comes with more than a few perils."

It appears that the people behind this law thought the mere threat of a lawsuit would cause abortion providers to shut down and that actual enforcement which would end up pitting the kind of repugnant people who would be abortion bounty hunters against sympathetic figures like doctors wouldn't be necessary. At first, that seemed likely, as clinics across the state shut down services and sent patients out of state for help. But then a San Antonio-based physician, Dr. Alan Braid, performed an abortion and wrote a Washington Post op-ed about it, daring anti-choicers to sue him. And sure enough, the situation turned into a circus, with two disbarred attorneys from out of state neither of whom actually oppose abortion rights suing Dr. Braid.

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John Seago, an anti-choice activist who helped pass this law, clearly recognizes the optics are bad here, whining to the New York Timesthat the lawsuits aren't "valid attempts to save innocent human lives" and instead are "self-serving legal stunts."

But here's the thing: There is no other way this law could be enforced but through repulsivepeoplefiling lawsuits. Despite all the self-flatteryabout being "pro-life," anti-choice activists are clearly motivated by misogyny, and don't care about "life."That's been demonstrated in a million ways, most recently in the embrace of anti-vaccine/pro-COVID-19 policies by Republicans. So anyone who would sue, declaring sovereignty over a woman's body and announcing his right to force childbirth on her, is going to be an unpleasant character. Seago knows this, I'm sure. He certainly sees the people who protest abortion clinics and how they don't generally do the best job of concealing how much hate and sexual resentment fuels their politics.

In a certain light, it makes a rough sense that conservatives thought they could get away with banning abortion through subterfuge. Americans have a long history of discomfort with the topic, and with talking about sex generally. Pro-choice activists are mostly women, making it easy for the right, in the past, to convincemost Americans that threats to abortion rights are being overblown by hysterical feminists. And while abortion is common in one sense 18% of pregnancies end in abortion, about 1 in 4 women will have one at some point it'snot something most people deal with on a daily basis. It's why the anti-choice movement has been so successful at gradually making abortion much harder to get without most people noticing. It's just not something most people think about until they or a loved one needs access.

But what conservatives are swiftly learning is Americans aren't the prudes and sexist they thought we were. Attitudes about sex are rapidly liberalizing. For instance, 73% of Americans are fine with sex outside of marriage now, up from 53% twenty years ago. (And those who disapprove are hypocrites, as 95% of Americans reported having had premarital sex in 2006, a number that's surely gone up since then.) And a majority of Americans agree that women have a long way to go to achieve equality, which is a good stand-in measure for whether or not people think sexism is wrong.

In light of these changes, it's not a surprise that people are both outraged about the Texas abortion ban and unafraid to say so publicly. The fight to end abortion rights is, politically at least, going to be much harder than Republicans were clearly betting it would be.

Continue reading here:

Republicans thought the Supreme Court could stealthily ban abortion. They were wrong - Salon

Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to get his Twitter account back, after being banned from the platform in January earlier this year. The 75-year-old former US president officially filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida on Friday, October 1st in an attempt to force Twitter to reinstate him, arguing that the ban actually violates the First Amendment, as well as Floridas new social media law. Wow weve never known anyone to be this obsessed with Twitter!

If you can recall, Trump was banned from the social network just two days after the deadly January 6th riots at the Capitol building which involved pro-Trump supporters protesting Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election. Twitter initially banned Trumps account for 12 hours due to the repeated and severe violations of the Civic Integrity Policy after he kept tweeting that the election was stolen from him, and then banned him permanently two days later. Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube also banned him following the riots, although Facebooks Oversight Board later upheld that decision.

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In Friday's court filing, Trump argued that the platforms ban violates the First Amendment, and then insisted that his Twitter account which had 88 million followers at the time of the initial ban "became an important source of news and information about government affairs and was a digital town hall." He also referenced Floridas new social media law, which essentially prohibits social media platforms from "knowingly" de-platforming politicians, and also requires them to apply "censorship, de-platforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner."

According to Friday's lawsuit, Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction of Twitters ban, also arguing that the social networking platform is "coerced by members of the United States Congress" and is therefore censoring him; he then described the social media platform as "a major avenue of public discourse." We can't believe how much time and energy he is devoting to getting back on Twitter!

Do you think he will successfully get his account back? Would you like to see him back on the platform? So many questions!

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Donald Trump Is Suing To Get His Twitter Account BackHe Cant Be Serious! - SheFinds

The Air Jordan 1 has become an it shoe within mainstream consciousness over the last four years, but it was once banned by the NBA. (It was actually the Nike Air Ship that was regulated by the league, but the Swoosh was trying to push Michael Jordans first sneaker.) Jordan Brand fully-embraced that nugget of history with the release of a Black/University Red colorway of the pair by the same name in 2011 (denoted by x marks at the heel). For its latest walk down memory lane, however, the subsidiary has ostensibly sprawled the words narrated in a commercial from 1985 about the banning onto a black and grey retro.

Immediately reminiscent of the silhouettes original Shadow colorway, the newly-surfaced pair features light grey overlays at the ankle, profile swooshes and bottom heel. Surrounding smooth leather, then, indulges in a pitch-dark tone that matches the Wings insignia on the collars lateral side. Both components arguably play secondary roles to the Jordan 1s most distinct detail: ostensibly hand-written text applied in all-over fashion.

While an early look at the pair makes deciphering the message difficult, the phrases stop and wearing them can be made out across the sneakers lateral profiles. More than 35 years ago, Nike aired a commercial (narrated in a similar style as Apples 1984 spot) addressing how the NBA disapproved its revolutionary new basketball shoe. The 32-second advertisement concludes with the following message: Fortunately, the NBA cant stop you from wearing them. Its possible the text scribbled onto the first Air Jordan sneaker refers to another part of MJs legacy, only time will tell.

No Nike SNKRS launch details are currently known, but this pair is likely to land in 2022. In any case, enjoy a first-look at the shoes ahead.

In confirmed Jordan release dates, the Jordan 12 Royalty is expected November 13th.

UPDATE (10/07/2021):An early mock-up and more in-hand images have been updated in this post. The pair is currently dubbed Rebellionaire, a cheeky nod to Michael Jordans now billionaire status. To think, it was made possible by not adhering to the NBAs rules.

Where to Buy

Make sure to follow @kicksfinder for live tweets during the release date.

Mens: $170Style Code: 555088-036

Images: @zSneakerHeadz, @shawnleekix

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This Air Jordan 1 Remembers The Infamous Ban Imposed By The NBA - Sneaker News

A former Shadow Hills High School boys basketball coach is scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday on charges of sexually assaulting a teenage girl he coached.

Ryan Leron Towner, 35, was arrested June 10 stemming from a Riverside County Sheriffs Department investigation. The alleged conduct occurred between May and July 2018, according to the Riverside County District Attorneys Office.

More: Former Shadow Hills basketball coach charged with raping teen

More: Shadow Hills hires new basketball coach, a former Banning coach who also won a 2020 CIF-SS title

Towner is charged with one felony count each of lewd acts on a child under 14 years old with force and unlawful intercourse with a minor, who was identified in court papers only as Jane Doe.

Towner, who remains free after posting $55,000 bond, is scheduled to be arraigned at the Larson Justice Center in Indio on Tuesday.

Investigator Joshua Reinbolz said authorities began investigating Towner in April.

Towner coached the girl on a travel basketball team, according to Reinbolz, who did not go into the circumstances of the alleged crimes.

It was unclear how old the girl was when Towner allegedly sexually assaulted her.

Towner coached the Shadow Hills boys team from 2018 through most of the 2021 season. The Knights won the Division 3-A championship in 2020.

Towner did not coach the team for its final 10 games during the 2021 season and was fired by the Indio school a few days before his arrest, the Desert Sun reported. It was unclear whether his firing stemmed from the allegations.

Towner has a prior felony conviction for credit card fraud.

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Ex-Shadow Hills coach charged with sexually assaulting teen due in court on Tuesday - The Desert Sun

Today lets talk about Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugens testimony before the Senate: the good, the bad, and what ought to happen next.

For more than three hours on Tuesday, Haugen addressed a subset of the Senate Commerce Committee. She appeared calm, confident, and in control as she read her opening remarks and fielded questions from both parties. While she brought more nuance to her critique than most Facebook critics she supports Section 230, for example, and opposes a breakup of the company she also said the company should declare moral bankruptcy.

This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable, or about one side being radicalized against the other, Haugen told Congress. It is Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion-dollar company by buying its profits with our safety.

The Senate largely ate it up. Long frustrated by Facebooks size and power and, one suspects, by its own inability to address those issues in any constructive way senators yielded the floor to Haugen to make her case. During the hearing titled Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower, Haugen walked senators through most of The Wall Street Journals Facebook Files, touching on ethnic violence, national security, polarization, and more during her testimony.

For their part, senators sought to paint the hearing in historic terms. There were repeated comparisons to Big Tobacco, and a Big Tobacco moment. This research is the definition of a bombshell, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who led the hearing.

Over at Facebook, the strategic response team lobbed a half-hearted smear at Haugen, noting bizarrely that while at the company, she had no direct reports and never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives. If theres a point in there, I missed it.

Ultimately, Haugen said little on Tuesday that wasnt previously known, either because she said it on 60 Minutes or it was previously covered in the Journal series.

What she might have done, though, is finally galvanize support in Congress for meaningful tech regulation.

Lets walk through Haugens testimony.

One, Haugen identified real harms that are taking place on Facebook services. For example, she talked about documents which indicate that using Instagram can contribute to eating disorders in some teenagers. Too often, discussions about the harms of social networks is either abstract or emotional. The primary benefit of Haugens leaking is to bring some empirical rigor to those discussions and to highlight the degree to which these issues are known, but not discussed, by Facebook executives. Thats powerful.

In response, Facebooks Monika Bickert told CNN that the same research shows that the majority of teenagers find that Instagram improves their well-being. But one of the hearings most powerful moments came when Haugen noted that only about 10 percent of cigarette smokers ever get cancer. So the idea that 20 percent of your users could be facing serious mental health issues, and thats not a problem, is shocking, she said, citing leaked data.

Two, Haugen highlighted the value of research in understanding problems and crafting solutions. For years now, weve watched Congress interrogate Facebook based on spurious anecdotes about who was censored or shadow banned, or what publisher was or wasnt included on a list of trending topics, to no constructive end.

It was refreshing, then, to see members of Congress wrestling with the companys own internal data. Sen. Ted Cruz, rarely seen operating in good faith on any subject, largely set aside his questions about censorship to ask Haugen about data exploring the link between Instagram and self-harm. Facebook will say, not unfairly, that senators were largely just cherry-picking with these questions. But we have to ground these discussions in something why not Facebooks own research?

Third, and maybe most potently, Haugen helped to shift the discussion of platform problems away from the contents of the speech they host and toward the design of the systems themselves. The problems here are about the design of algorithms of AI, Haugen said, in response to a question about whether the company should be broken up. That wouldnt solve anything, she said the same engagement-based algorithms would likely create similar issues within the new baby Facebooks.

Haugen posited regulation of algorithms specifically, banning engagement-based ranking like Facebook and Instagram use today as a way to avoid the First Amendment issues that come with attempting to regulate internet speech. As the scholar Daphne Keller has written, attempting to regulate speech algorithms will likely trigger First Amendment scrutiny anyway.

Still, Congress seemed receptive to the idea that it ought to focus on broader system incentives, rather than stunts like the recent efforts in Florida and Texas to force platforms to carry all speech regardless of content. The details get tricky, but that shift would be a welcome one.

For all its positive aspects, Haugens testimony had some unfortunate aspects as well.

One, Haugen came across as a solutionist: someone who believes that any problem created by tech can therefore also be solved by tech. This comes across most strongly in her advocacy for a reverse-chronological feed, which she argues would remove incentives to share polarizing or harmful content.

It seems possible that this is true but only marginally. Polarizing and harmful content was often shared on Twitter and Instagram during the many years that those services used reverse-chronological feeds. Thats not to say reducing algorithmic amplification is a bad idea, or that Facebook shouldnt research the issue further and share what it finds. But given the broad range of harms identified in the Facebook Files, I found it surprising that Haugens pet issue is feed ranking: I just dont believe its as powerful others seem to.

My second, somewhat related concern is that Haugens testimony had tunnel vision. Those of us who opine about social networks are forever at risk of attempting to solve society-level problems at the level of the feed. To avoid that, we have to bring other subjects into the conversation. Subjects like how the US was growing polarized long before the arrival of social networks. Or the research showing that long-term Fox News viewership tends to shift peoples political opinions more than Facebook usage. Or the other reasons teenagers may face a growing mental health crisis, from growing inequality and housing insecurity to the threat of climate change.

Its possible to consider a subject from so many angles that you find yourself paralyzed. But its equally paralyzing to begin your effort to rein in Big Tech with the assumption that if you can only fix Facebook, youll fix society as well.

Finally, Haugens testimony focused on the documents, rather than her own work at Facebook. I cant have been alone in wanting to hear more about her time on the Civic Integrity team or later working in counterespionage. But senators were more interested in the admittedly fascinating questions raised by the research that she leaked.

Thats understandable, but it also meant that Haugen had to regularly remind the subcommittee that they were asking her questions in which she did not have expertise. In my own talks with current Facebook employees, this is the point on which I hear the most exasperation: just because you found some documents on a server, they tell me, doesnt mean you are qualified to describe the underlying research.

Theres an obvious fix for that summon more qualified employees to testify! But in the meantime, I wish Haugen had taken more opportunity to discuss what she saw and learned with her own eyes.

Platforms should take the events of the past few weeks as a cue to begin devising ways to regularly share internal research on subjects in the public interest, annotated with relevant context and with data made available to third-party researchers in a privacy-protecting way. Facebook regularly tells us that most of its research shows that people like it, and the companys market dominance suggests there is probably evidence to back it up, too. The company should show its hand, if only because soon enough governments will require it to anyway.

Congress should pass a law requiring large platforms to make data available to outside researchers for the study of subjects in the public interest. (Nate Persily argues here that the FTC could oversee such a design.) I think sharing more research is in Facebooks long-term self-interest and that the company ought to do so voluntarily. But to get an ecosystem-level view, we need more platforms to participate. Unless we want to rely on whistleblowers and random caches of leaked documents to understand the effects of social networks on society, we should require platforms to make more data available.

What Congress should not do is pass a sweeping law intended to solve every problem hinted at in Haugens testimony in one fell swoop. Doing so would almost certainly curtail free expression dramatically, in ways that would likely benefit incumbent politicians at the expense of challengers and marginalized people. Too many of the bills introduced on these subjects this year fail to take that into account. (Unless they are taking it into account, and quashing dissent is their ulterior motive.)

Instead, Id like to see Congress do a better job of naming the actual problem its trying to solve. Listening to the hearing, you heard a lot of possibilities: Facebook is too big. Facebook is too polarizing. Facebook doesnt spend enough on safety. Facebook is a national security risk. There still appears to be no consensus on how to prioritize any of that, and its fair to wonder whether thats one reason Congress has had so much trouble advancing any legislation.

In the meantime, right or wrong, Haugen appears to have persuaded Congress that Facebook is as bad as they feared, and that the companys own research proves it. Simplistic though it may be, that narrative Facebook is bad, a whistleblower proved it is quickly hardening into concrete on Capitol Hill.

The question, as ever, is whether our decaying Congress will muster the will to do anything about it.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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Whats good, bad, and missing in the Facebook whistleblowers testimony - The Verge

The Vaska Theatre in Lawton will be showing Hocus Pocus with a shadow cast on select dates through the month October. If you've never experienced Vaska's Shadow cast it's a great time and fun for the whole family. Hocus Pocus will be a "Hex-A-Long" with the shadow cast and feature all kinds of interactive segments throughout the movie. The opening night will be this Friday, October 15th (10-15-21) at 7:00pm.

They'll also be showing it on Saturday, October 16th (10-16-21) at 7:00pm so make plans now to catch Hocus Pocus at the Vaska. If you can't make it this Friday or Saturday they'll be showing it on October 29th, 30th, and on Halloween night showing at 6:00pm. I can't think of a better way to celebrate All Hallow's Eve.

It's great to finally see some of our all-time favorite Lawton Halloween happenings return in 2021 after last year's cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We're definitely making up for lost time this year and it's looking like we'll have all kinds of fun family events between now and All Hallow's Eve.

The Vaska Theater has all kinds of great movies to help get you into the Halloween spirit. Not only will they be doing the Hocus Pocus "Hex-A-Long" the Vaska will be showing the new Halloween Kills movie starting this Thursday (10-14-21) and Sunday (10-17-21). Click here for showtimes and details.

Another great movie experience at the Vaska Theater will be the Rocky Horror Picture Show complete with the shadow cast. They'll be showing that on October 22nd (10-22-21) and October 23rd (10-23-21). You can get all the details by clicking here. The Vaska has all kinds of Halloween fun planned throughout the month.

Some of the other Lawton Halloween happenings that are returning for 2021 include: Lawton's Spooktacular and Park-O-Treat and of course trick or treating. Here's the best part, they're all on different days!

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Vaska Theatre Will be Showing Hocus Pocus With Shadow Cast - KLAW101