CT.

Yeah. Sure. So to understand what shadow banning is, we kinda need to go back to the older days of the Internet when it was mostly forums. Think Reddit, something awful, Discus. And back in these days, people use the word shadow banning to mean, when a user posted something to a website, and to them, it looked like they had posted it totally normally. But to everyone else, it appeared invisible. Right? And this was an ability that a lot of these kind of early forums had to, put trolls and other kind of people sharing harmful content in this, quote, unquote, shadow realm. But, in in recent years, we've actually seen the term change meaning a lot. Right? Social media companies have become larger. They have become a lot more complex, and they just have a lot more people on them. And that means that they also have introduced a lot of other ways of content moderation. And not all of those moderation ways, involve informing the end user about what happened. Right? So usually, let's say you make a Facebook post and, you know, Facebook decides that you're spreading COVID misinformation, for example, it might get deleted and it says, hey. We removed your post because COVID we thought it was COVID misinformation. Now for shadow banning, it used to be able to mean one might use the word shadow banning to say, oh, hey. Facebook removed my post. They made it invisible, but no one else can see it. Now people would use it more they could use it to say, oh, then it's no longer showing up in people's news feeds. People are unable to comment on it. It is lower ranked down. Maybe the post isn't appearing in search. There's all these different ways that platforms have that they, in theory, can use to moderate content without telling the user. And with that, the definition is expanded, right, to be any of these forms of uninformed content moderation. And because we kind of have this old and new definition, this sometimes leads to a lot of tension between the ways that platforms talk about shadow banning and the ways that people understand shadow banning. It's a way that a platform can say say, we never shadow ban. This is not something that we do, and be telling the truth using their older definition. But at the same time, people online saying they've been shadow banned and also telling the truth. So, yes, it's a very contentious term, a very old term, and one that we see people use a lot of different ways. So

Yeah. So this is and let me just quickly plug here that, CDT put out a report, shedding light on shadow banning where we, survey a thousand US social media users about their opinions on shadow banning. And we interviewed a number of people, who believe they'd be shadow banned or work with such people. And also part of this project, we interviewed a lot of, people that work at social media companies, and we asked them this. Why might it be the case that you don't always tell users when, their content has been removed? And sometimes they said, look. It sometimes is just difficult to do. Right? These are very large systems. They don't always necessarily know when they're doing what. There may be reasons that, people wouldn't talk about. For example, if a if, some practice seems to be controversial. Right? Maybe they would not want, they would not want whatever public pushback might come from, having that sort of practice. But also a a really big one that we heard from social media companies was that, that sometimes informing users of content moderation when it happens actually ends up making it less effective in certain ways. Right? And we can think about this happening when it's users trying to take advantage of the structure of a platform. Right? So so you can think of, someone who, for example, is writing every possible misspelling of a racist slur to see which ones do not get past automated filters. Or you could imagine a botnet liking all of its own posts in a way to try to get certain ideas trending or on people's news feeds. Right? A social media company might not want to inform these advanced actors that their content is being moderated, or else they might learn how these detection systems work and learn to better evade them. That's that's a good point.

Absolutely. First, I really wanna thank Gabe for that really thorough and, like, outstanding overview of really what the issue is at hand because shadow banning is an issue that's you know, it's it's sort of like a store that cuts both ways. Right? It can be used to, essentially prevent, you know, like, far right q anon style extremist content from appearing on a platform, but also can hurt marginalized communities as well. And it can be argued that the policy is used in a way that could be essentially aimed at both. And that was exactly my story. Essentially, what happened to me was, I found out in 2020 that, my Twitter account had a search and search suggestion shadow ban, through this sort of, like, grassroots website that lets you add your username onto, like a like a, a shadow ban test and see, you know, are you, do you have your Twitter replies, muted for other people to see? Can people not search you on Twitter? Can people not see your content on their timeline? And I found out that some of my content was being suppressed in that regard. And it checked out with an experience that I was having, which is that I noticed certain tweets of mine weren't really getting as much traction as they used to ever since, I posted a, a, a nude image of myself on my main Twitter account. And in a lot of ways, that experience, really encapsulates what, shadow banning is for marginalized communities. Right? A lot of the discourse around shadow banning is about being a marginalized, person as in a sex worker and using social media like Twitter and suddenly finding out of nowhere that your account has just so totally been, been almost, like, filtered out of the conversation for other people to see. And that's what happened to me. I wasn't seeing as much engagement. I was suddenly seeing people would tell me, hey. I couldn't see your replies, Anna. Like, I didn't even realize you were talking to me for months. Like, what's going on here? Or people couldn't find me. They'd say, like, hey. I I know you're a journalist reporting on sexuality issues, but I didn't even know you had a Twitter account. Like, I couldn't find what your username was. I thought you deleted it. Yeah. Issues like that, you know, they happen a lot, and I would consider myself a high profile user, so I do already have some privileges. For a lot of sex workers who maybe just have, like, a couple 100 users and Twitter decides to go ahead and and limit their their ability for their, for their content to be seen. You know, this is someone who might, for instance, be, you know, like, a struggling, like, 20 young woman living on her own who's using OnlyFans and using, like, these these, you know, clip sites in order to basically, you know, just simply make an income to, like, pay rent and pay the bills. And Twitter suddenly decides, hey. We don't really like this content being so visible, so we're gonna kill your ability to make an income. And that was, in some ways, reflected in my experience because they did lose, a little bit of traction, my own online sex work, because of this content being, being, being, muted and sort of shadow banned in this regard. The other thing I wanna add too also just real quick is how, navigating shadow banning also comes with the threat of you never really know when you're quite shadow banned, but you can sort of sense it and try to figure it out whether through the sort of, like, these online tests to figure it out. Or at the same time, you can chat with other people who have had similar experiences, which is how I learned what happened to myself. But I also, at the same time, while I dealt with that shadow banning, had done with, had dealt with situations where Twitter, for instance, had simply suspended my account temporarily or or forced me to delete a tweet because, you know, they thought I was making a joke about, you know, being a slut, or rather, I made a joke about being a slut, and Twitter thought I was calling another woman a slut and decided to, you know, force my account into suspension until I deleted the tweet. That was something that happened to me and is sort of part of this larger issue of of Twitter acting in bad faith ways where marginalized users end up having their whole entire, you know, online presence essentially being let me rephrase that. It's a situation where in the end, marginalized users who are simply trying to be themselves on the Internet are forced to sit there and say, I don't know what I can post because Twitter might ban me for simply making a joke that I would make to another marginalized person like myself at a bar or a party or a date or so on.

How is shadow banning affecting these groups? I would absolutely say that it can cause a chilling effect. One of the things I've noticed a lot is that, especially with LGBTQIA, I'll use queer as a shorthand here, especially if queer users, they don't really know what they can post, and they don't really know how they can act on the Internet because they could have their account shadow banned. I've seen people talk a lot about transphobic content being posted on Twitter, and, their biggest fear whenever they talk about that is, on the one hand, they're worried that Twitter is going to decide, well, we're gonna ban you for for criticizing, say, transphobic content because you were a little too mean on your timeline. It sounded a little bit too abusive for, you know, calling out bigotry on the Internet. Right? And on the other hand, they're also sitting there saying, you know, what kind of content will I post even just outlining that, say, bigoted materials being targeted at me? Could Twitter decide that content is a little too sensitive, and we don't necessarily want people to see that. So we're gonna shadow ban or limit access to parts of this account. No one really knows. That's part of the problem. It's a black box. And, you know, as Gabe pointed out, on the one hand, that black that black box can be really useful if you're doing things such as trying to make sure that q and on users are not spreading bigoted content. On the other hand, though, it's really difficult because if you're a marginalized user, you don't know what you can post, and and how you can express yourself. I think one of the other big ways that this impacts, marginalized users specifically is the fact that queer Internet users and sex workers are not two separate groups. They often are both interconnected with each other, as in there are queer sex workers in a lot of them. A significant portion of sex workers are, for instance, queer women or queer men, especially trans women. There's a very long history of that in our community as a transgender woman myself. And so not just is it that, well, what impacts sex workers inevitably impacts queer users, and sex workers have to be extra careful about what kind of content they post or how they can necessarily, you know, have their business online, how they can make money and income and ability to pay those bills I talked about. But also just the fact that there's a lot of an in between between those groups. How many queer women on Twitter, you know, post, you know, softcore nudes of themselves or suggestive photos of themselves? A significant portion. It's also kind of doubles as a dating platform for a lot of queer women. But for a lot of queer women, they have to sit there and calculate, you know, like, can I post an explicit photo of myself because someone like, you know, Anna Valens, who is this journalist, did that, and she had her account shadow banned? So they have to sit there and make those calculations, and it causes what I like to call a chilling effect as a result. You never really know what you can post on the Internet. You never really know what you can do to keep your account in the best standing possible. And it's sort of it forces compliance because you you never really know when a moderator is looking at you. And I'm sure this chilling effect just goes beyond just

it is a black box. We do not know, exactly what these companies' practices are, how frequently they may be shadow banning. And empirically, we kind of really can't know without, them telling us. Instead, the only way that we know that people are shadow banned, there are some tools for some platforms such as the recently defunct shadowband.eu that I think Anna was talking about, for Twitter. There's now a bunch of clones of that. Basically, it computationally checks to see whether certain things are visible from certain places. But on a lot of platforms, it really ends up being a lot of citizen science. You know, if you have a 90% drop in your, engagement as some Facebook groups, folks who I talked to, you know, they had a 90% drop in their engagement for exactly seven days and then it came back. Right? These are kind of things where you can say, okay. Maybe it seems that this does not seem random. Right? This does seem like there's a platform intervention here that I'm not hearing about. But at the same time, it is you know, those are very fuzzy lines. And, a single tweet not performing well or there was someone who I talked to who believed they've been shadow banned, they said, I've not gained any users in three months. You know? Things like that. It it it really is like, what is the, like, level of rigor of citizen science that we need to know whether or not someone has been shadowbanned or something has not been shadowbanned? It can really vary, and it's really hard to draw lines there. Now what we do know, though, is who believes that they've been shadowbanned. We did a thousand person survey about this of, US social media users, and we found that people who believe that they've been shadowbanned, skew younger, more conservative, more male, more often Latino, and more often non cis. There's also lots of groups who, have sort of done, above and beyond citizen science to actually really document to calculate, alright, just how many people have these, believe that they've been shadow banned. Hack and Hustling has done some fantastic work with this with sex workers. Salty has done done some great work with this with queer and trans folks sort of documenting how often they, see different content moderation practices occurring, including sex workers. We hear this with birth workers. We hear this with libertarians. I actually spoke to the creator of, one shadowban checking website, and he said that by far, most of his users were, k pop fans who were checking to see whether their entries into these fan Twitter contests that get run were actually going through. It was something along the lines of, you know, comment tweet here if, for your favorite for your favorite member of some band and, people were afraid they were getting shadow banned. So we don't know so, again, we don't empirically know, but we do see, people who believe that they've been shadow banning sort of clustering in, certain groups and certain demographics.

Absolutely. You know, it it really connects a lot to some of the things I mentioned earlier, but also it connects to the larger issue of who gets shadowbanned and how. So the term structural gaslighting actually, it it really came to prominence two years ago through writing on, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. It it formulated originally as a a phrase to, specifically describe the experience of black Americans who in every institution they came across were facing systemic racism, you know, financially, in the housing market, in education, at work, you name it, everything, up to and including policing in the judicial system. So So I think it's really important first to center this around that specific topic as the the origin of that term, because it's related to the larger issue of structural gaslighting in shadow banning. Hacking hustling that Gabe mentioned wrote, at length about structural gaslighting as an element of shadow banning. And they wrote specifically, because the work came shortly after the twenty twenty Black Lives Matter protest, and around the same time rather. They they wrote significantly about how there were sex workers, activists, and organizers that were facing shadow banning. And so this was a group of people with different needs or different, sometimes different needs, sometimes different things that they're posting on, a platform like Twitter, sometimes coinciding needs. There's a lot of activists and organizers that are sex workers, and they were realizing that they were facing this this, problem where they were doing, you know, anecdotal evidence of each other or looking into, you know, sort of, like, this brief citizen science, or they were hearing, you know, these more rigorous reports about shadow banning, and they were getting together and saying, wait a minute. My experiences mirror this person's experiences that mirror this person's experiences that mirror this group's experiences. But Twitter as a company, whenever you contact them, when that whenever, you read any policy they put out, again and again will say, we don't we don't shadow ban. That's not something that we do. That's that's never been policy at Twitter. And we know that that's really not the case, based on reports like hacking hustlings. There does seem to be shadow banning at Twitter, and everything we've discussed pinpoints to that happening on some level. It becomes more of a semantics argument. But even then, you know, Twitter does this. It says, we don't shadow ban. What are you talking about? Because it's trying to to not just excuse the policies that they have of moderating content very covertly, but it's also trying to keep people confused. You know? If you're sitting there and saying, well, I might be shadowbanned because I didn't get a lot of engagement on this post and then this other post, so I don't really know. You're not sitting there saying, you know, Twitter said specifically that it shadow banned me. You're saying, I don't really know, so I'm not really confident. So I don't really know if this is a systemic problem, so I don't really know if I should, like, raise the alarms on this one. Right? I don't really know if this is just me overreacting. You know? I'm I don't really know if this is just me as a sex worker responding to the trauma of the stigma of being a sex worker and reading red flags that aren't there. So it's purposely deployed in a way where it's it's cruel and manipulative because it tries to convince people of something that's not true. Right? It's trying to convince people that gaslight or not gaslight, that shadow banning does not happen when it does. And it, as a result, gives Twitter more power in the whole entire conversation.

Thanks, Anna. And, I just wanna add also, by the way, let me apologize. You hear that. There's a little thunder in the background. It really just started raining hard here, so please excuse those noises. But I just wanna add about what you said about structural gaslighting, where there's actually some really interesting work from professor Kelly Cotter who does, research on, shadow banning as a form of structural gaslighting. And she interviewed a number of folks, a number of social media users about what their beliefs were around shadow banning, people who hadn't been shadow banned. And surprisingly often, she heard people say, look. These platforms say that they don't shadow ban, and I believe them. I don't they don't really have a reason to lie. And it it it's interesting that, it's not just a form of gaslighting as here's an authority speaking against your lived experience. It also ends up being the case that other social media users believe it's true. And and there's many people who think they've been shadow banned and actually haven't been or many people who, have been shadow banned and don't know they have. But, it is it is very difficult to kind of move past the language that a lot of these platforms set. They really do have a lot of rhetorical strength, and affect people's beliefs about content moderation.

I wanna comment as well and actually support what you're saying, Gabe, because, I found that to be the case a lot. I've seen a lot of users, especially queer users, who are banned from platforms like Twitter, from Twitch, from YouTube, not even in shadow banning, just banned. They've clearly violated a rule, and you'll commonly see people defend the rule. There's sort of like this deference to authority. Well, this rule makes sense. Well, you're on this platform, and you should just simply play by all the rules that we are. You know, the problem is, you know, how are the you know, how are those rules enforced? Right? We see this on a political level, you know, on on a judicial level, I should say, you know, that some rules, some laws are applied more strictly to certain marginalized identities, and some rules, some laws, some penalties are not. And that's reflected a lot in these social media platforms as well. There's a recent issue right now. Again, not a shadow banning case, just a regular banning case. A trans Twitch streamer named Kefals was banned from Twitch for about a month for making, I believe, a a thumbnail of a bunch of slurs that they were sent, you know, as, again, a trans Twitch streamer, by viewers. And Twitch didn't really act on the people that were sending those harassing slurs, but they did ban Keflez. And people have come out and said, well, Kefuls, you shouldn't have created a thumbnail that was highlighting all those slurs you were going to talk about. You broke the rules. So I I think it's really true, and it's not just about shadow banning either either. There is this sort of deference to authority, and people really think of these platforms as, well, sometimes unfair to them. Ultimately, you know, you signed up for the platform. You gotta do what the platform says, which is not always the full story.

This is really a running theme in a lot of the conversation that we've had, which is certain marginalized groups, especially queer, trans, sex working. Those ones tend to be more specifically targeted, for the content they produce. We've seen this a lot especially in the sex working world, which is why there's a lot of this carryover from sex workers who are familiar with these sort of sort of covert banning tactics, bringing it over to larger mainstream social media, platforms and talking about some of the strategies places like Twitter use to shadow ban users. But, fundamentally, shadow banning tends to target certain users that are marginalized for the content they produce, call it high risk, and then try to essentially remove them or silence them from the platform. One thing I talked about in my 2020 report is this idea of digital gentrification. And the idea of digital gentrification is essentially that a website invites a certain kind of marginalized user to come in, like sex workers. It makes them feel comfortable for the most part. And then eventually, it decides to take a market shift or rather decides to take a more profit oriented direction and remove sex workers for another group that's deemed superior, that's deemed either more profitable overall or perhaps better for the website's image. This is not necessarily about shadow banning all the time, although shadow banning can be connected to it. A really great example of it at large that most people are familiar with is OnlyFans. OnlyFans nearly removed explicit sexual content. If if it wasn't for immense public backlash, this was around August 20, August 20 what are years? This is around, September to August 2021. There is immense backlash from that, and, ultimately, OnlyFans decided to allow, you know, explicit sexual content, which means mostly allow sex workers to remain because by removing explicit sexual content, you're essentially telling sex workers to for the most part to get out. But that kind of strategy is really common with these more adult oriented websites that then decide to go in a safer direction or social media sites that are at first NSFW friendly, you know, not safe for work, sexually explicit friendly, and then decide to kick the sex workers out. And in a lot of ways, this is what the fear is around shadow banning, that the end goal is to silence certain marginalized voices and make them at least less visible as part of a larger project of eventually removing them from the website.

Absolutely. I and OnlyFans is really such an outlier too. I can't stress that enough. That shocked a lot of us that are, like, more watchdogs around, sex workers' rights in the online sphere. We pretty much figured OnlyFans is toast. For that to happen is immensely, and outlier is the exception to the rule, and it's usually you're kicked off the platform.

Let me just let me just say really quickly that shadow banning is just something that is so hard to talk about because it is a mix it is both a lot of people's lived experiences, and it is also sometimes a rhetorical device that ends up getting used to stir up embitterment or conspiracy or righteous anger. Right? This idea of, like, I'm being silenced. They don't want you to hear this. And there are a lot of, political folks in particular that kind of can end up using this using it as something of a rallying cry. Right? So I know that we were saying on the one hand, like, tech companies, a lot a lot more people than one would think sort of trust tech companies and about what they say. I think there's also another world of people who no matter what tech companies say, they will absolutely not believe them. And I think that, shadow banning, has brought and, like, beliefs around shadow banning has really fueled a lot of this kind of more conspiratorial view of content moderation. And again, it is not because shadow banning doesn't happen. It's of course shadow banning happens. But it is something that in many cases is kind of completely unconfirmable. I think there's two really big cases that brought shadow banning to the fore. One, I believe, was in 2018, after Twitter had rolled out this new, like, anti troll detection. Like, they rolled out an update that was sort of, like, meant to quiet the voices of trolls and just, like, people spouting abuse and garbage. And a vice reporter found that a number of conservative politicians, I think, representatives Jim Jordan, Matt Gates, Rona McDaniel, who's, the head of the RNC, a number of other folks, their names were not appearing in search, in Twitter search bar. It was not auto filling their, usernames when you began to type them in. And it was not happening in the case for any, like, federal level, like, representatives or senators. And this led conservatives to be just apoplectic. It led to and it really kicked off a lot of the beliefs that many have now about social media companies censoring conservative viewpoints. Right? There was sort of the beginning of that idea, and the beginning of this, like, there is a shadowy cabal determining what you can and cannot do online. Twitter had a post mortem that they posted about it that said, look. This actually affected hundreds of thousands of accounts across the political spectrum. This was not a targeting of conservatives, but it continued to be something that you hear. You heard, you heard, Donald Trump talk about it in the January 6 rally. And there was also a case, in 2020 of shadow banning on, users who were talk on TikTok, activists and users who were talking about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. A lot of activists were saying their videos were were getting zero views. Like, they had been going from many, many views to zero views. And, that was only on videos that used hashtag BLM or hashtag George Floyd. And there was this sort of, like, uproar that TikTok was stopping this, like, larger groundswell of popular support that was happening and that they were not that they were trying to hide political content. They also had a post mortem that said, look. It was actually this is our spam filters got tripped up. We had never had so many people using a hashtag at the same time, so we assumed it was spam. But still, there are many, there's a lot of conversations and there's a lot beliefs around, TikTok shadow banning black lives matter activists. And so it's very it can be very difficult to, like, sort the wheat from the shaft in some of these things. But for people, there can sometimes be political power that gets gained from that outrage. Right? And we've seen some of this actually turn into proposed bills. Right? So we've seen this in the Florida social media bill, the Texas social media bill that this anger at, social media companies for for allegedly secretive and biased content moderation practices, has actually turned into them passing laws that limit companies' abilities to moderate content themselves. That disempowers them and in turn ends up empowering people in ways it ties companies hands. Some of these bills tie companies hands from being able to, stop the flow of abusive content, which which is dangerous. So yeah, it it is it is it is difficult to really sort, like, what is shadow banning as a rhetorical device and what is shadow banning as, like a method of squashing speech. And it's all very, very messy.

To jump in actually really quick because I wanna expand on this, from a journalistic perspective. You know, one thing I've always come across as a journalist who writes on sex work and sex workers writes and thus talks about this topic is, you know, when you interview, sex worker sources who do say, you know, I've been shadow banned. I'm experiencing shadow banning. You know, on the one hand, you wanna be sympathetic to what they say, but on the other hand, as a journalist, you do also have to investigate. You know, do they show signs of shadow banning? Can others corroborate this, etcetera, etcetera? And I really wanna stress, you know, again, not to say that this theoretical source is absolutely not shadow banned, but when you're working in a position where you're confirming facts and information around it, it's actually really difficult when you're trying to be, you know, this objective authority figure that's confirming what has or hasn't happened because it it is really hard to say. You know? Is that is TikTok actually, you know, suppressing Black Lives Matter? Was it really just a spam filter? It's you could sit there and argue the point constantly with all sorts of different people, and all sorts of different journalists would report on that issue. So in different ways depending on their political perspective. So it is really a situation where the lack of of clear confirmed information means all sorts of different theories can can run wild and also just that it can be really fundamentally difficult for someone who's supposed to be speaking truth to power to speak truth in the first place. We just don't know. We don't know what's true.

Thanks, Jamal. So, yeah, in this report, we talk about three different ways that we want social media companies to, improve their transparency around shadow banning. And the first is that, we say that companies should really very much limit when they shadow ban. And they should only shadow ban when users are trying to take structural advantage of how the platform works. Right? When they are trying to learn how to get around moderation methods, when they are trying to create soft puppet accounts to continue attacking people. There's a number of ways where we want social media companies to be able to stop advanced actors, but that's kind of it for about reasons that we see for legitimate shadow banning. Don't think that they should ever that if companies are going to remove sexual content, for example, they should say should be open about removing it. Right? They should not do it surreptitiously. Or if they are going to remove COVID misinformation, they should do it openly. They should tell the users what's happening so they can learn about the norms of the platform. The only people that they should not be informing are advanced actors, advanced and malicious actors. And then we also the second thing is that sort of to get over this sort of epistemic nightmare that Anna and I have both talked about of figuring out who's been shadow banned, we think that platform should actually share these, these rules about when they shadow ban. Right? So if a platform does shadow ban users who are trying to circumvent certain moderation methods, they should share that. Right? The the, the idea that, like, there is shadow banning. Right? There needs to be some shift from the debate about, like, should companies shadow ban or should they not shadow ban to when is it justified for a company to not disclose that they're moderating content? And there should be public accountability for this kind of thing. We should know whether or not places are shadow banning nudity, whether they are shadow banning certain types of political content. And finally, the third thing is that, you know, there is a very deep distrust that a lot of folks have of these platforms, which you were getting to in question. And I think that we also need external methods of confirming some of these things. Right? So we also ask that social media companies make data available about when they shadow ban and who they're shadow banning. Make that data available to researchers to understand what unintentional consequences might be happening, to understand, any sort of any number of, like, freedom of expression concerns that companies might not even be observing. Because, again, the way that shadow banning works right now, you know, there isn't a way to report that it's happened so that companies can find out mistakes. There isn't an easy method to get uncharted unless you have connections to these companies. It doesn't have that feedback mechanism, which maybe it should also have, but researchers need to be part of that mechanism to make sure things are not going a foul. Yeah.

Sure. I would really say, you know, the fundamental of shadow the fundamentals of shadow banning is that, you know and I I think Gabe really speaks to this, throughout this conversation that it it's not as if shadow banning is something that is, either all good nor all bad. It has clearly has some purposes. The question is, you know, whenever an institution deploys or any sort of major, major platform, uses a tactic in order to moderate content, who does it hurt? Who does it harm? Who's disadvantaged already? And I think that's something that's really important to this conversation. Whenever I talk to people about shadow banning, I always try to stress at the end of the day that this is about, even if there are really important applications of shadow banning, that a, anyone with a lot of power who isn't sensitive to how that application will hurt a marginalized person is fundamentally going to be going let me rephrase that. It's fundamentally going to act in a way where they're going to hurt a marginalized person, a marginalized user, a marginalized voice on the platform. So I I think one of the most important things to really stress, in this whole entire conversation is how, it's very easy for tactics like this to be deployed in a way that hurts people whether intended or otherwise by the platform at large. And more awareness of this and more transparency when, appropriate is incredibly important. I'll also add really quickly as well. You know, I was, banned, from Twitter, a couple years ago for making actually, I've been banned a couple times, so it's kinda hard to say sometimes. Let me rephrase that. I was banned a couple years ago because of a transphobic hate mob, and the only way I was able to get myself unbanned from it was because I had a PR source at Twitter that I contacted, and I was gonna say, hey. I'm gonna write about this for a story. And she was able to field that with Twitter trust and safety and get me unbanned. So I think shadow banning is so much a microcosm of a larger issue of what are these platforms doing, how are they affecting me as a marginalized person, and who do I need to know in order to make sure that I don't get kicked off, which is such an enormous part of this conversation.

Yeah. I I think Anna really said it all. But I think, yeah, that, you know, shadow banning, the way that it is done right now, it is an unknown unknown that ends up making marginalized groups feel more marginalized. But I think that with the right transparency mechanisms in place, it doesn't have to be. I think that platforms can still have shadow banning as a tool in their back pocket that they need to get, to sort of help address the problems raised by the most harmful and advanced malicious actors on platforms, while at the same time, not having those problems bleed onto marginalized communities who end up getting sort of the most screwed over when over moderation and under disclosed moderation happen.

Woah. Are you guys hearing this? Yeah. There's a thunderstorm happening here. And and I this thunderstorm might be, coming towards you.