10 Your Engagement Suddenly Falls Off a Cliff

If you're used to getting lots of likes, shares, and comments, but it all suddenly goes away overnight—that's a big old red flag for shadowbanning. Sure, everyone has a slow week on social media now and then, and maybe you're just the victim of an algorithm change, but if your posting habits haven't changed and the drop is sudden and noticeable, then I have some bad news for you.

Of course, on some sites, like X, you can pay to have your replies boosted. When I switched to a premium X account to promote my work, I saw a massive leap in engagement. So if that's an option for you (and you think it's worth it) it's something to consider.

9 People Say They Can’t Find Your Posts

If you get messages from your followers saying things like "why did you delete that post" or "I can't find your account anymore", that's pretty much a clear sign your account is shadowbanned.

Of course, you can check this yourself by logging into an alternate account, or asking someone you know to check for you. Don't get worried too quickly however, often this is just temporary and due to technical issues on the platform. However, if, after a few days, your account still isn't searchable, it's probably a sign you're on the shadowban list.

8 Hashtags Don’t Work Anymore

While they don't have that much impact anymore, hashtags on social media sites are still a reliable way to become part of a specific conversation. If there's a hot hashtag that everyone is including in their posts, but yours isn't doing the usual numbers, that might be a sign that you've been shadowbanned.

You can search for the hashtag using an alternate account to see if your post shows up in the feed for that hashtag, and if it doesn't, it likely means the platform is suppressing your account. That said, I've found hashtags to be unreliable as a whole, so this method of testing whether your account is showing up as normal might not be all that useful anymore.

7 You Can’t Find Yourself While Logged Out

While it's a good idea to check if your content is visible using a friend's account or one of your own alts, you should also check if you can find it when not logged in at all. Activate the private browsing mode for your browser and access the social media platform's site without logging in. Then try to search for your account and see if it comes up.

The idea is that incognito mode hides your identity from the site, and so it will show you what a neutral viewer would see, circumventing the shadowban's efforts to keep you in the dark about your account status.

6 Your Content Is Hidden in Comments or Replies

This is a relatively new feature on social media sites, but sometimes your comments on the posts of others aren't completely hidden from everyone. Instead they go in a special hidden replies box that someone has to open manually. Sometimes the comments that are put in here automatically are harmless, but usually they're from bot accounts, low-quality accounts, or problematic accounts that the platform doesn't want people to see at a glance.

If you get put in hidden replies now and then, it's not a big deal and has more to do with the content of that specific reply, but if you get thrown into the naughty box, regardless of how harmless your post is, there's a good chance the platform thinks your whole account should be deboosted. Not every platform makes it obvious this has happened either, so you may need to check where your reply has gone using an alternate account.

5 No One Is Interacting Outside Your Core Followers

While they are largely invisible to us using social media on a daily basis, most people are really part of a small network of accounts that interact often. So, when you're shadowbanned, part of the strategy to make you fail to realize this is that those interactions are left untouched. If you mostly spend time chatting and interacting with a core group of mutuals or followers, you may not realize that you've been cordoned off from the rest of the public.

However, it is very odd to never get any interaction from accounts outside your core group, and if you look back at the last few months of social media and realize that you only see the same people interacting over and over again, that should raise some suspicions. It's not quite a smoking gun, but it's part of the total picture that can help you realize you're wasting your time online.

4 Your Metrics Show You’re Screaming Into a Void

While the platform can silently ban you, if you have access to your metrics (such as X Analytics) you can see your engagement fall into a black hole neatly on a graph. Unless the platform is also fudging your numbers, but then again, I've yet to see this myself or hear of anyone who sees high-engagement numbers in their analytics while otherwise clearly being shadowbanned.

3 Your Posts Are Delayed or Missing From Timelines

Sometimes, a strong clue that something weird's going on with your account is that your posts do show up eventually, but there's a pretty long delay. So your followers will see what you posted, but only after a day or more, as if the post has been left to bake in the oven a little bit. For those who follow you, which posts show up can also be inconsistent.

Of course, you need to actually ask people you know who are following you whether they've noticed it. In most cases, people won't volunteer that information unless you ask them directly.

2 You’ve Been a Bit Naughty Lately

Most of the time, it's not entirely clear why you might have been shadowbanned, but in some cases you know what you did. If you've been a little spicy online lately, or you've been caught in a flame war of some sort, you might be in the penalty box. You don't even have to be the true perpetrator, it's possible to just get swept up through association.

Search your feelings—and if you know it's true that you've been misbehaving online, then there's a chance you're shadowbanned. All you can do is wait it out, or move on to somewhere else.

1 You Get No Explanation or Warning

Most of the limitations and punishments meted out by social media accounts are pretty clear. If a platform like X or Facebook suspends or bans your account, you'll get a detailed message telling you what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it.

The whole reason shadowbanning is so annoying is that you are told nothing. There is nothing you can do about it. You're basically just ghosted by the platform and excluded from participating. You don't know why (OK, maybe you do, but still) and you don't know how long it will last.

Worst of all, companies won't even admit that they practice shadowbanning. They might use vague terms, and hide behind algorithms and such, but never come out and say that some users are sidelined. So we're even gaslit on whether shadowbanning is a real thing or not. Even worse, there are ways to detect whether a new account has been made by someone who's had a ban, so in theory a shadowban could follow you to new accounts.

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It might seem that these are all rather vague and inconclusive clues, but that's the nature of shadowbanning. There are sites that claim to offer tests for shadowbanning, but there's no way they can guarantee the results, and you have no way of knowing how the test works or if it's real.

Ultimately, if your social media account has died and shows no sign of coming back to life, you can try contacting support about it, but at this point it's completely out of your hands.