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How Shadow Banning Can Silently Shift Opinion Online

In a new study, Yale SOM’s Tauhid Zaman and Yen-Shao Chen show how a social media platform can shift users’ positions or increase overall polarization by selectively muting and amplifying posts in ways that appear neutral to an outside observer.

Legislation forcing TikTok to sell or shut down its U.S. operations is now law, the result of concerns that the app could be providing data about Americans to the Chinese government. But Zaman argues that there’s a more potent means through which social media platforms can control collective opinions over time, called “shadow banning.” Part of this tool’s power derives from the fact that it’s currently near-impossible to uncover, even by policymakers or software engineering experts. Shadow banning is hard to spot because the opinions that are muted depend on their stance relative to other users—resulting in a mix of shadow-banned and amplified users, without any obvious rhyme or reason.

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