Shadow banning by social media is not as big of a problem as some people believe it to be, but it is an issue that concerns some.
Facebook has quite a reputation as a promoter of shadow banning. Shadow banning never had much impact on the volume of traffic received by dads&things. The traffic from all social media to dads&things amounts to no more than about 0.1 percent of all visits to dads&things, and that is after I tried for years to mention various articles as much as possible at social media to drive traffic to dads&things. It was a waste of time and effort to try doing that.
Not even Google thinks that its version of the social media, Google+, has much of a future, which is why I had to remove all mention of it from dads&things. Notices kept popping up, when I was doing anything with WordPress, telling me that Google was pulling the plug on Google+, notices such as this:
Google+ is on the way out
I have more than 1,300 FB friends, and sometime I wonder whether Facebook forgot to inform the world that it is pulling the plug on the life support of non-paying clients of FB. Consider that when I post a new article to dads&things, it usually receives some views (mind you, comments are closed at dads&things, which is too bad but a necessity). However, consider also that when I post or share something at my FB wall or timeline, whatever the item may deal with, it receives no or virtually no likes.
That is not because people don’t like what I post. It is because they don’t see that I posted anything. What they don’t see, they can’t like or react to in any other fashion. The converse is true. I don’t see what my FB friends post, for which reason I can’t like or react to what I don’t see, although, when I check, I see that the FB friends who seem to have stopped posting anything were in reality busy posting a lot of interesting things, of which I saw absolutely nothing. Consider these last few posts I had made on FB and the lack of likes that makes them shine:
There you go. The four posts I made to my FB Timeline during the past 24 hours did not receive a single like, not even any sort of reaction. You think that is bad? No, it isn’t. I did not have a chance to see many of the postings my 1,300+ FB friends made during the past 24 hours, hardly any, and I had not a single chance to declare that I liked any I saw – none that mattered, that is, postings that my FB friends thought I should see. Sorry, I did not see any of those and saw no notifications that any of them had been made.
During the past 24 hours, I received a total of 18 notifications that told me that some of my 1,311 FB friends had posted something they wished me to see. Do you think that it is quite possible that in about 999 out of a 1000 cases where someone posted something that he wanted me to see, Facebook decided that I should not be able to see it? I think so. You check what your FB friends posted during the last day or so, compare that to the number of FB notifications you received, and you’ll think so, too.
Blogs have big advantages over social media. Nothing that you are supposed to see on a blog is hidden from your view. It is entirely up to you and to no one else what of it you will read or look at in detail.
See also:
- Australian Govt Admission: We Censor Websites
- Most of my FB friends must have died : perhaps I did
- Is your website a “hate-site”? How do you know?
- Google search bias quantified, constitutes censorship
- America the dark continent
- Social media campaign for Cyntoia Brown
- Speech codes limit the right to free speech
