What are X shadow bans?

A shadow ban is when a platform quietly limits the reach of your content without telling you.

Your account still looks normal to you — you can post, like, comment, and follow — but behind the scenes, the platform reduces how many people actually see your content.

Breaking down the four known X shadow bans and how they look like

There are four commonly recognized types of shadow bans typically associated with the X (formerly Twitter) algorithm. This content is provided strictly for educational purposes and does not dismiss or contradict official statements from Elon Musk or the X Help Center, which maintain that the platform does not engage in shadow banning. As with all algorithm-related discussions, this information is subject to change and may be revised or discredited in the future as platform policies evolve. For any questions or concerns regarding this content, please reach out via the Contact Us page.

Search Suggestion Ban

This type of ban causes an account to not populate search suggestions and people search results when it is searched for while being logged out. Twitter seems to take tie strength or a similar metric into account. While an account may be suggested to users you are strongly tied to, it may not be shown to others.

Search Ban

This type of ban causes your tweets to be hidden from the search results entirely, no matter whether the quality filter is turned on or off. This behavior includes hashtags as well. This type of ban seems to be temporally limited for active accounts. If you are not a friend to someone - he won't see your handle or posts in his results, even won't be able to tag you because you won't be in the searches.

Ghost Ban

Do you ever get introduced to posts of someone you don't follow just because someone that you follow commented there. This is the algorithm promoting content to you because you and that person may have a common interest because you are mutuals - though in this case it won't happen. This is what is referred to as conventional shadowban or thread banning as well. It comprises a search ban while threads are completely ripped apart by hiding reply tweets of the affected user to others. Everything will look perfectly normal to the affected user but many others will not be able to see reply tweets of the affected user at all. Reasons for this ban include behavior like excessive tweeting or following. Again, this type of ban seems to be temporally limited for active accounts. I

Reply Deboosting

If Twitter's signals determine that an account might engage in harmful behavior, Twitter hides their replies behind a barrier and only loads them when "Show more replies" is clicked. This behavior is personalized, i.e. Twitter does not hide the tweets of accounts you follow. Therefore u an unbiased reference account without followings is used in order to determine whether tweets within a thread can be retrieved without clicking "Show more replies" from its view. In some cases, Twitter classifies accounts as offensive. In this case, replies are hidden behind a second barrier within the "Show more replies" section.

Check out how x shadow bans can affect your account growth here

So this is how Shadow ban Checkers function, 

Take the outcome of the test which may depend on the conversation which the tweets were found in. For testing, the latest reply tweet is taken that is not within a conversation you started. Note that test results are cached for a short period of time.

A failure to test is neither a positive nor a negative test result. This test relies on some conditions that are not fulfilled by all accounts. In some cases, due to technical reasons the test isn't effective.