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Shadowbanned Stories in 2023

Yes, it’s real

Douglas Giles, PhD
5 min readJan 10, 2024
What evil lurks in the heart of Web sites? The shadow knows.

Your chance to read the articles Medium hid from you! Links below!

Every social media platform and Web site forum has rumors that certain people or posts are shadowbanned. It’s the suspicion that the platform doesn’t outright ban those people or posts, but rather has in its algorithms a categorization of certain posts that they won’t be shown to other users’ feeds.

Web platforms don’t admit to the practice, and it is difficult to prove that shadowbanning is real. And yet, what few people realize is that Medium has at least three tiers in its feed algorithm, different levels in which they decide how many impressions a story will get.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006362473

Tier 3 means the story will only be shown to a small number of people and hidden from everyone else. Allegedly this is to those followers of an author, but maybe not even that many people. More likely, based on my experience, the lowest tier will only be shown to e-mail subscribers and hidden from everyone else, even followers. That fits the loose definition of shadowbanning.

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Douglas Giles, PhD
Douglas Giles, PhD

Written by Douglas Giles, PhD

Philosopher by trade & temperament, professor for 21 years, bringing philosophy out of its ivory tower and into everyday life. https://dgilesauthor.com/

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