Shadow Banning - Does it exist?

[Ocean Chan]

Hi everyone,

I was reading an article, about instagram shadow banning users who were "too" active such as over commenting, liking etc and users who had the same tags for every post.

So the concept is, users who were too active were treated as bots or spammers, instagram would hide their photos (without them knowing - hence shadow banning) and not prioritise their posts.

I was wondering if that happened with youtube, would a channel account be penalised if they commented too much or posted too many videos with the same tags/descriptions.

It'll be interesting to know if youtube did this as well

 

[DigiBox]

Yes shadow banning is a thing.

It only happens for extreme content when a channel is marked as age restricted on youtube.

Youtube will outright inform someone when their account has been deactivated though.

 

[iGM]

Yes shadow banning is a thing.

Youtube will outright inform someone when their account has been deactivated though.

Would that not defeat the meaning of a shadow ban?
Are shadow bans not meant to be a ban on content without the creator knowing (referring to the OP's Instagram example). If so, I don't think such a thing exists on YouTube. Obviously unlisted and private videos exist but I am fairly certain shadow banning is not a thing on YouTube.
Getting content pulled for the site and getting banned from the site certainly is but I don't think shadow banning in the OP's understanding of it is a thing on YouTube.
This is just speculation from personal experiences. I have seen a few YouTubers (YouTuber's I watched for a bit) get outright shut down but never seen this shadow ban the OP describes. Then again, if it did exist, there would be very few ways of identifying that it does.
Perhaps if you made a video with a very specific title (such as a random sequence of letters and numbers) and just getting a friend to check, while logged out of their account with a different IP address and cleared cache? If you are concerned about having been shadow banned.

 

[Conso1727]

I heard youtube throttles promoting for non "guidelines-compliant" videos and unmonetized ones, but I don't recall the source so I can't confirm that.

 

[Ocean Chan]

Would that not defeat the meaning of a shadow ban?
Are shadow bans not meant to be a ban on content without the creator knowing (referring to the OP's Instagram example). If so, I don't think such a thing exists on YouTube. Obviously unlisted and private videos exist but I am fairly certain shadow banning is not a thing on YouTube.
Getting content pulled for the site and getting banned from the site certainly is but I don't think shadow banning in the OP's understanding of it is a thing on YouTube.
This is just speculation from personal experiences. I have seen a few YouTubers (YouTuber's I watched for a bit) get outright shut down but never seen this shadow ban the OP describes. Then again, if it did exist, there would be very few ways of identifying that it does.
Perhaps if you made a video with a very specific title (such as a random sequence of letters and numbers) and just getting a friend to check, while logged out of their account with a different IP address and cleared cache? If you are concerned about having been shadow banned.

Yeh exactly. To be clear for example:
A channel is in youtubes "bad books" but not enough to be outright suspended.
So instead of suspension whatever the channel uploads is completely ignored by youtube's algorithm.
So the video doesnt appear on recommended, searches etc but someone deliberately going to this channel's account may still see the video

 

[iGM]

Yeh exactly. To be clear for example:
A channel is in youtubes "bad books" but not enough to be outright suspended.
So instead of suspension whatever the channel uploads is completely ignored by youtube's algorithm.
So the video doesnt appear on recommended, searches etc but someone deliberately going to this channel's account may still see the video

In that sense, no. I don't think YouTube does shadow ban people as per say. The algorithm is so fundamentally flawed that it is difficult to tell if you are shadow banned due to the amount of content uploaded to the site. Even with decent/good SEO - getting within the top ten pages of search results is hard. Any deeper than about twenty pages deep and people tend not to find your content anyway.

 

[Andie_the_Lab]

it's easy to see who is shadow banne as depicted a few weeks ago.

When you searched Logan Paul, his channel didn't show up, but rather other channels talkign about Logan Paul showed up.


Now it gets a bit more confusing for new channels, because it's not necessarily a shadow ban vs the algorithm not recognizing you. Like i have to search Andie the Lab for me to show up, but if i type in labrador go pro adventure, even if i'm the most recent upoad, it doesn't show up