When shadow banned become the shadow

The best definition I have found of Shadow Banning comes from a Breitbart article “Twitter Censorship: What is Shadow Banning?” [Link: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/01/11/twitter-censorship-what-is-shadow-banning/]:

“Shadow banning”, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.”

Apparently, Social Media platforms are using this method of ‘Shadow Banning’ in order to squelch the popularity of the users of their platform who express ideas and ideals which they find ‘unfavorable’. Ok… let’s just call it what it is: “censorship”!!!

Now I know that everyone gets very emotional about it. I have been shadow banned for such a long time. I can’t remember or identify when it actually started. Although I am not American I noticed, sometime before Trump became President, that something was terribly wrong. I went into the human frailty mode of “my friends don’t like me anymore” but realized that that was total nonsense. I quickly recognized that I am in good company because most of my friends were also starting to get shadow banned. In the world of social media fame and glory, I am probably at the bottom of the list despite having a somewhat larger number of followers … but who really cares! I guess the size of our followership inflates our egos but, as we all are finding out, it is meaningless. This is just one of life’s little online lessons.

Instead of ranting about it and going on forever I started to take emotions out of the game. Yes, I opened social media accounts on other platforms but time is limited and to be effective one has to make one’s sphere of influence count. Fact is, taking away my right to speak freely is not a game …. it is war!

When in war become a warrior or when shadow banned become a shadow…
I started to actively seek out people, news personalities and media organization in whose posts I could inject my message as comments. Simply put, I became their shadow. I learned, quickly, that for this method of posting to be effective one has to make very certain that one’s comments are truly relevant to the poster’s message. I guess it is not that nice to the poster because this, in effect, hijacks the poster’s followers. Yet, one has to remember that in the state of war there is no such thing as a “nice”. Additionally, it is important to realize that re-posting or retweeting will not do much since no one sees one’s timeline anyway. It does, however, give the original post more popularity and makes the poster feel “oh-so-good”. In other words, the shadow must make sure that is takes good care of the person it is shadowing. There is, of course, one tiny little problem. What happens when just about all your friends/followers are also shadow banned? What happens if there are no more originals to the shadow? Interestingly, while the value of one’s comments do start to decrease, a group of shadows shadowing each other can also become very effective providing they work as an organized team.

Unfortunately, there are still so many on social media who will not do that. They post and post and post and their followers and the comments on their posts continue to decrease. It seems that, in their view, their status is more important than their message. Has anyone ever heard and understood the meaning of the expression “beating a dead horse”? Can you imagine, for one moment, if people set aside their ego and, just for a short period of time, put their message above their own ego? If people understood that then shadow banning would not succeed. The power of the people cannot be eliminated through shadow banning when their motivation is based on ideas and ideals instead of ego.