Shadow ban (also known as ghost ban) is one of the most discussed aspects of social media platforms. Over the years, a number of users have experienced that their content does not reach the desired amount of users. Shadow banning is an act where a social media portal can partially block a user from their online community. Users do not have a way to know whether they have been shadow banned unless they experience a decrease in their reach.

Twitter, which predominantly is a portal for people to reach millions through limited alphabets, has been criticised in the past over shadow banning. Back in 2018, the company had given out an official statement that they do not limit users from reaching their audience. However, the update inJanuary 2020 terms of the platform subtly state that Twitter does shadow ban its users.

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Back in July 2018, President Donald Trump had accused Twitter of shadow banning Republican politicians. This had resulted in an outcry on the internet where Twitter was criticised for silencing its users. However, in an official statement, Twitter had cleared the air by stating that it does not shadow ban. An excerpt of the statement has been given below. Users can read the complete statement here.

We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly dont shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

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However, Twitter updated its terms and services in 2020 and subtly confirmed that it does shadow ban users on its platform. The official terms state that the platform may limit distribution or visibility of any content on the platform. While Twitter has been accused of limiting the distribution of content for many users, it won't be the only social media platform to do so. Similar shadow banning has been reported by users on Facebook, Instagram and others.Check out an excerpt from the updated terms of Twitter below -

We may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you.

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What is Shadow Ban on Twitter? Limiting the distribution & visibility of content explained - Republic World - Republic World

Actor Kangana Ranaut feels that she has been shadow-banned by Twitter, after noticing that she has been losing around 40,000-50,000 followers every day. She said that it was unfair but added that nationalists have to struggle everywhere.

It started when one of Kanganas followers claimed that her follower count is decreasing on Twitter and it went down from 992k to 988k in the span of an hour. She replied, I agree I notice pattern every day 40-50 thousand followers drop, I am very new to this place but how does this work? Why are they doing this any idea? @TwitterIndia @jack @TwitterSupport.

Another follower suggested that she has been shadow banned for promoting nationalistic sentiments. Shadow banning is a form of Twitter censorship in which the microblogging site hides or blocks your content from your followers and other Twitter users. This happens if one is in violation of Twitters policies.

Kangana seemed to agree with this explanation and said, Hmm I see Nationalists have to struggle every where, racket is so strong, I noticed because last night we were to very close to a million, anyway, sincere apologies to all those who are getting unfollows automatically, so unfair but arnt we used to this now?

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For a while now, Kangana has been raising her voice against the movie mafia and practice of nepotism in the film industry. Recently, she talked about Bollywoods alleged drugs nexus and claimed that 99% of people in the industry are drug users.

On Sunday, Kangana likened herself to late actor Sushant Singh Rajput and said that she was also targetted and isolated by the heavyweights of Bollywood. I was also called bipolar, a sexual predator, I was sl*t shamed, they isolated and banned me, eventually entire media banned me n my films as well, and mafia openly declared my tragic end, and all this happened in full public glare, no one said anything #IAmSushant, she wrote on Twitter.

Kangana has been seeking justice for Sushant. She has alleged that the movie mafia tried to destroy his career and used their connections in the media to plant fake blind articles about him.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

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Kangana Ranaut feels she is shadow banned by Twitter as her followers decrease, asks how does it w... - Hindustan Times

The phenomenal rise of social media (SM) platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others is proving to be a double-edged sword in the functioning of democracies. On the one hand, it has democratised access to information. On the other hand, it has concentrated power over that information with a handful of private companies, their billionaire owners, and certain ideologically committed activist groups.

Billions of netizens around the world now feel empowered to bypass traditional curators of information, such as journalists and editors, in searching for their choice of content. They have also become creators and disseminators of content, not just consumers of it. This is further accentuated by tech platforms directing more content at people similar to what they have already seen, thus creating echo chambers of like-minded groups.

This is already known. What is happening now, however, is the next stage of that transformation in how information is generated, disseminated, and consumed, and it is directly impacting how democracies function. There is a global war underway, involving the role of SM and freedom of expression, which is an extension of the culture wars between the Left and Right.

India is seeing the early skirmishes of the online version of this war, which has already progressed to a much higher intensity elsewhere, most notably the United States (US). In Americas bitterly polarised polity, the frontline of this war is a battle between Twitter and President Donald Trump. The formers flagging of a presidential tweet as fake news, and the latters executive order altering the liability of SM platforms who edit content, is worth understanding better.

One of the most stark aspects of the Wests culture wars has been its erosion of the right to freedom of expression, which had been a hallmark of its modern democracies. Especially since the early 20th century, US Supreme Court rulings by the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, interpreting its Constitutions first amendment, had established what many considered a gold standard of free speech.

While those struggles for free speech had pushed for more freedom, even to say and write very unpleasant things, the intensification of the Wests culture wars in this century has seen a reversal of that trend. Curbs on hate speech became widely accepted and implemented. But, thereafter, there has been a relentless push by so-called woke activists for ever more curbs on speech, often implemented forcefully and without consensus, based solely on political correctness.

A key aspect of this has been the shift from earlier activism against governments clamping down on speech to a focus instead on pushing media, and especially SM, to impose curbs on politically incorrect speech.

The irony in this new activism for speech curbs is that it is being championed by those who call themselves liberals. Of course, this does not represent classical liberal philosophy, and is instead a reflection of the far-Left takeover of present-day liberalism. This is visible around the world, whether in the forced withdrawal of a US academics paper contradicting the zeitgeist about race relations, or in the unsavoury departures of senior staff at the once venerable New York Times, after they had dared to publish op-eds reflecting Centre-Right views. In India, this bullying has manifested itself in the ganging up by self-avowed liberal authors to stop the publication of a book contradicting their narrative on this years Delhi riots.

Such far-Left canons have now invaded the realm of big tech firms. That should hardly be a surprise, considering Silicon Valleys preference for recruiting liberal and woke employees. Books and articles by conservative authors such as Douglas Murray and business journalists such as George Anders have documented explicit hiring policies, practices and statistics to confirm Left-wing dominance among SM employees. It was, therefore, inevitable that employee activism would push these platforms into adopting leftist, illiberal policies.

The inconsistencies in those policies show up when SM platforms apply selective standards, such as when Twitter was accused of hypocrisy for not flagging or proscribing the aggressive, warlike tweet of a West Asian leader.

President Trumps executive order directly impacts this. In US law, SM had been protected against the kind of liabilities such as defamation that traditional news media are subject to, on the grounds that SM are simply platforms for others opinions and did not edit or otherwise shape that information. But now that they are, by flagging, shadow banning, or deleting posts and accounts, the Trump order echoes many voices that had been asking for SM to be treated on par with media outlets.

A similar battle is raging about SM giants abuse of their massive power by sourcing news from media companies without paying for it, and then disseminating and profiting from it. Despite a bitter legal struggle, Australia is likely to become the first nation to require Google to pay for such content.

These battles are relevant to India, which is both the largest democracy as well as one of the largest user bases for SM platforms. Some of these battles have already begun here, such as the recent Indian version of the Wests leftist pressure on Facebook to put curbs on Right-wing posts. It is time to broaden the dialogue here about how India ought to respond.

Baijayant Jay Panda is vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a former Member of Parliament.

The views expressed personal

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Social media: The new theatre of Indias culture wars - Hindustan Times

Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives and our futures.

The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online.

The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launch. It may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.

In the UK, few will forget this year's A-level algorithm. A-levels are key exams for 18-year olds; they make or break college offers. COVID-19 canceled them. Teachers were asked what each pupil would have scored. But the government fed these numbers into an algorithm alongside the school's past performance. Result: 40 percent of all teacher estimates were downgraded, which nixed college for high-achieving kids in disadvantaged areas. Boris Johnson backed down, eventually, blaming a "mutant algorithm." Still, even a former colleague of the prime minister thinks the A-level fiasco may torpedo his reelection chances.

In the U.S., we don't tend to think about shadowy government algorithms running or ruining our lives. Well, not unless you're a defendant in one of the states where algorithms predict your likelihood of committing more crime (eat your heart out, Minority Report) and advise judges on sentencing. U.S. criminal justice algorithms, it probably won't surprise you to learn, are operated by for-profit companies and stand accused of perpetuating racism. Such as COMPAS in Florida and Wisconsin, which ProPublica found was twice as likely to label Black defendants "high risk" than white defendants and was wrong about 40 percent of the time.

The flaws in such "mutant algorithms," of course, reflect their all-too-human designers. Math itself isn't racist, or classist, or authoritarian. An algorithm is just a set of instructions. Technically, the recipe book in your kitchen is full of them. As with any recipe, the quality of an algorithm depends on its ingredients and those of us who have to eat the result really don't think enough about what went on in the kitchen.

"All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority, an easy way to delegate responsibility; a short cut that we take without thinking," writes mathematician Hannah Fry in her 2018 book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms. "Who is really going to click through to the second page of Google every time and think critically about every result?"

Try to live without algorithms entirely, however, and you'll soon notice their absence. Algorithms are often effective because they are able to calculate multiple probabilities faster and more effectively than any human mind. Anyone who's ever spent longer on the road because they thought they could outsmart Google Maps' directions knows the truth of this. This thought experiment imagining a day without algorithms ended in terrible gridlock, since even traffic-light systems use them.

Still, you would be right to be concerned about the influence algorithms have on our internet lives particularly in the area of online content. The more scientists study the matter, the more it seems that popular search, video and social media algorithms are governing our brains. Studies have shown they can alter our mood (Facebook itself proved that one) and yes, even our 2016 votes (which explains why the Trump campaign is investing so much into Facebook ads this time around).

So before we find out the full effect of algorithms in 2020 let's take a look at the algorithms on each of the major content services many of which are surprisingly easy to erase from our lives.

No algorithm on Earth, not even China's Social Credit system, has the power of Mark Zuckerberg's. Every day, nearly 2 billion people visit Facebook. Nearly all of them allow the algorithm to present posts in the order that the company has determined most likely to keep them engaged. That means you see a lot more posts from friends you've engaged with in the past, regardless of how close you actually are to them. It also means content that causes big back-and-forth fights is pushed to the top. And Zuckerberg knows it.

"Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness," warned a 2018 internal Facebook study, unearthed by the Wall Street Journal. Left unchecked, these mutant algorithms would favor "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform."

Zuckerberg, reportedly afraid that conservatives would be disproportionately affected if he tweaked the algorithm to surface more harmonious posts, shelved the study. It's been a good four years for conservatives on Facebook, who have been playing the referee ever since they petitioned Zuckerberg to stop using human editors to curate news in 2016. Now look at Facebook's top performing posts in 2020; on a daily basis, the list is dominated by names such as Ben Shapiro, Franklin Graham, and Sean Hannity.

But even conservatives have cause to be disquieted by the Facebook algorithm. Seeing friends' popular posts has been shown to make us more depressed. Facebook addiction is heavily correlated with depressive disorder. So-called "super sharers" drown out less active users, according to the 2018 report; an executive who tried to reduce the super-sharer influence on the algorithm abruptly left the company.

How to fix it

Luckily, you can reduce their influence yourself. Because Facebook still allows you to remove the sorting algorithm from your timeline, and simply view all posts from all your friends and follows in reverse chronological order (that is, most recently posted at the top). On Facebook.com, click the three dots next to "News Feed," then click "most recent." On the app, you'll need to click "settings," then "see more," then "most recent."

The result? Well, you might be surprised to catch up with old friends you'd almost forgotten about. And if you interact with their posts, you're training the content algorithm for when you go back to your regular timeline. In my experience, reverse chronological order isn't the most thrilling way to browse Facebook the algorithm knows what it's doing, locking your brain in with the most exciting posts but it's a nice corrective. If you're one of the two billion on Facebook every day, try this version at least once a week.

The YouTube "watch next" algorithm may be even more damaging to democracy than Facebook's preference for controversial posts. Some 70 percent of YouTube videos we consume were recommended by the service's algorithm, which is optimized to make you watch more YouTube videos and ads no matter what (the average viewing session is now above one hour).

That means YouTube prioritizes controversial content, because whether you love it or hate it, you'll keep watching. And once you've watched one piece of controversial content, the algorithm will assume that's what you're into, steering you to the kind of stuff viewers of that video opted to watch next. Which explains how your grandparents can start by watching one relatively innocuous Fox News video and end up going down a QAnon conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

A former Google programmer, Guillaime Chaslot, found the YouTube algorithm may have been biased enough to swing the outcome of the 2016 election, which was decided by 77,000 votes in three states. "More than 80 percent of recommended videos were favorable to Trump, whether the initial query was 'Trump' or 'Clinton'," he wrote in the immediate aftermath. "A large proportion of these recommendations were divisive and fake news." Similarly, Chaslot found that 90 percent of videos recommended from the search query "is the Earth flat?" said that yes, indeed it is.

This isn't just a problem in the U.S. One of the most important case studies of the YouTube algorithm's political impact was in Brazil, where fringe right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected president after unexpectedly becoming a YouTube star. "YouTubes search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil," a 2019 New York Times investigation found. Even Bolsonaro's allies credited YouTube for his win.

How to fix it

Keep the algorithm at bay. Disable 'Up Next.'

Turning off autoplay, an option next to the "Up Next" list, will at least stop you from blindly watching whatever the YouTube algorithm recommends. You can't turn off recommendations altogether, but you can at least warn less tech-savvy relatives that the algorithm is doing its level best to radicalize them in service of views.

Chaslot's nonprofit algotransparency.org will show you what videos are most recommended across the site on any given day. By now, you may not be surprised to see that Fox News content tends to float to the top. Your YouTube recommendation algorithm may look normal to you if it's had years to learn your likes and dislikes. But a brand-new user will see something else entirely.

While parent company Facebook allows you to view your feed in reverse chronological order, Instagram banished that option altogether back in 2016 leading to a variety of conspiracy theories about "shadow banning." It will still show you every photo and story if you keep scrolling for long enough, but certain names float to the top so frequently that you'd be forgiven for feeling like a stalker. (Hello, Instagram crushes!)

How to fix it

As of a February update, Instagram will at least let you see who you've been inadvertently ignoring. Click on your profile icon in the bottom right corner, click on your "following" number, and you'll see two categories: "Least Interacted With" and "Most Shown In Feed." Click on the former, scroll through the list, and give your most ignored follows some love.

You can also sort your feed by the order in which you followed accounts, which is truly infuriating. Why offer that option, and not just give us a straight-up chronological feed? Instagram is also said to be testing a "Latest posts" feature that will catch you up on recent happenings, but this hasn't rolled out to all users yet.

Just like its social media rivals, Twitter is obsessed with figuring out how it can present information in anything other than most recent order the format that Twitter has long been known for. Founder Jack Dorsey has introduced solutions that will allow you to follow topics, not just people, and to show you tweets in your timeline that drove the most engagement first.

How to fix it

Go! See latest tweets! Be free of the algorithm!

All of these non-chronological tweaks fall under the "Home" heading at the top of the page. Click the star icons next to it, and you'll have the opportunity to go back to traditional Twitter-style "Latest Tweets." Of all the social media services, Twitter is the one that makes it easiest to ignore its recommendation algorithm.

It may take a little more scrolling to find the good stuff on Latest Tweets, and of course what you're seeing depends on what time of day you're dipping into the timeline. Still, Latest Tweets is your best bet for a range of opinions and information from your follows unimpeded by any mutant algorithms.

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Algorithms control your online life. Here's how to reduce their influence. - Mashable