My Unofficial Guide to X Shadow Banning

What is a Shadow Ban?

There are different types of shadow bans.

Search Suggestion Ban — This type of ban stops you from appearing in the search bar, as shown below. It also, in my experience, seems to cause your posts to appear less often on other people’s timelines. I’ve experienced a great loss in impressions whilst under a search suggestion ban. You will still show up in the search bar for yourself, but not for other users. Therefore you’re unlikely to know that you’re affected unless someone else tells you, or you run a test.

Search Ban — This type of ban stops your tweets from showing up in search results entirely.

Reply Deboosting — You’ll have noticed that, at the very bottom of an active comments section, you will often see a section of hidden replies. They only load when you click ‘show more replies’. X have decided that these users might engage in harmful behaviour, so hide their comments behind a barrier. This is reply deboosting.

Ghost Ban — A ghost ban is the most brutal type of shadow ban, in my experience. It is also known as a thread ban, because it stops other users from being able to see your replies at all. Everything will look normal to you, but you won’t be able to engage in comment sections. Naturally, this can be extremely frustrating…