Overheard my nephew explain TikTok's "shadowban" like it was obvious

He said the algorithm just stops showing your stuff to new people if you use certain words like "kill" or "suicide" too often in captions, even if you're talking about a movie. Do platforms actually have secret filters like that or is this just kid logic spreading around?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles83627d ago

100% real, I watched my buddy's band account get gutted overnight after he posted a show flyer that had "die" in the song title. Three days of zero reach until he deleted it. Kids actually know what they're talking about on this one.

daniel_cooper3427d ago

Huh, I never thought about it that way but it makes you wonder if there's some automated flagging system that just scans for certain words without any human context.

colethomas27d ago

Read a post on here a while back from someone who runs a weed shop account. Said they kept getting their posts suppressed any time they used the word "cannabis" but "weed" or "pot" worked fine. Makes you think the algorithm is scanning for buzzwords without understanding context at all. Your buddy's band story fits right in with that. The automated system probably saw "die" and lumped it in with violence or self-harm keywords. No human ever looked at that flyer. Just lines of code deciding what people get to see.