Here are the signs that you have been shadow banned or black listed:
- when you post a video, it gets zero views
- when you post a video it may start to get quite a few views and then immediatley it stops happening
- after many years, your posted video gets under one hundred views
- you cannot find your work or your name in detailed searches on the search engine or a specific site search.
- when you try to search for something on a search engine or on a specific site you see or feel that your search results may be altered, hence limiting your research
- when you type in the title of your work or your name other things show up and it is not your work or name and it is opposite.
- when you submit your site to a search engine you can not find it when you type it in to search on search engines
- you are not able to put links that are clickable in the description on youtube or on other sites
- you are forced to verify your site, identity, phone number or email with a certain site or tech company so they can further have data on you to further silence you.
- no matter what you do to follow procedure of ensuring your visibility, you still can not be found.
- you are flagged for saying anything on social media and are accused of violating policies or breaking rules when you did not
- your website accounts are banned with no explanation
- your website accounts are banned after being accused of violting rules although you did not do anything
Above are the telltale signs that you were shadow banned or silenced
Now it is time to put more words to it by giving my opinion as to why this happens and share my personal experience about it. The first thing I can say is the internet or the world wide web is not as free as we think. What I mean to say is you are not truly free to say or do what you want. There is no true democracy on the internet which is why you can be excluded by a tech company or a certain website for what you said with no due process or regard for freedom of speech as guaranteed by the United States constitution.
This exclusion can also be a joint effort by many websites where you see yourself mysteriously being unable to post something on many sites. Freedom of speech is not very prevalent on the internet and when it is, there are many consequences that follow. That consequence is being shadow banned and or blacklisted by companies on the internet which make you invisible and dead to the web universe.
So how does being shadow banned or blacklisted start?
I noticed it with my friend Rich the Bum, a music artist. He has an album out there called “Instrumental Failure by Rich the Bum,” but you would not know because when you type in Rich the Bum, you get a different artist and a different song. I asked him why that is happening, and he felt he was being shadow banned and blacklisted for posting things online.
With me it started when I put out a cartoon that people thought was racist because I was doing it in the spirit of Looney Tunes, when the creator did all the voices. All of a sudden it was flagged by haters and then it happened: I got no views and when I searched for my name or my title, I could not find it.
Another time, I posted on a social media site political opinions and the owners of that social media site clearly flagged my account. Not only was I not able to get back on, when i was I limited. I could not get into certain groups; I could not find everything on a search when I did get back on.
This other time, I spammed a live chat with my product during a hot topic of conversation in a political news live stream and then all of a sudden, my ability to post links on my YouTube description box was taken away.
Once you get noticed the wrong way on the internet it happens, you get blacklisted or shadow banned, from there your searches get altered, you cannot find yourself on a search, and no one will view you or find you on the internet. I am not sure how long it lasts, many times for years, other times forever.