Stealth banning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Stealth banning (also called shadow banning, hell banning or ghost banning[1]) is the act of blocking a user from an online community in such a way that the user does not realize that they have been banned while also reducing their impact on other users. By making a problem user's contributions invisible (or less prominent) to other members of the service, the hope is that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site.[2][3][1] [4] If the user never becomes aware that they were banned, it will not occur to them to attempt to circumvent that ban. The system is a more complex example of the "don't feed the troll" approach to community management.[4]

Comment ghosting (or selective invisibility) is the practice of rendering an individual comment invisible to everyone except the poster, in order to eliminate disruption it might otherwise cause.[3] Stealth banning is sometimes also called "Coventry" or "ghost-posting".

History[edit]

An early form of stealth banning has been found in the mid-1980s Citadel BBS software, which had a "problem user bit".[4] When enabled, the user would still be able to read public discussions, but any messages posted by that user would be automatically rerouted to a different "twit room" discussion instead.[5]

Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described stealth banning for online forums in 2006, saying how such a system was in place in the project management system FogBugz, "to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone". As well as preventing problem users from engaging in flame wars, the system also discouraged spammers, who if they returned to the site would be under the false impression that their spam was still in place.[2] The Verge describes it as "one of the oldest moderation tricks in the book", noting that early versions of vBulletin had a global ignore list known as "Tachy goes to Coventry".[6]

A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning" for spamming and abusive behavior.[7][8]

Craigslist has also been known to "ghost" a user's individual ads; and reportedly entire accounts.[9][10][11] Reportedly, an ad is placed and confirmation is sent that it has been posted; the ad may be viewed in the user's account, but, if ghosted, will fail to show up in the live listings.

In 2017 Twitter implemented a similar "timeout" feature where accounts could be temporarily restricted such that only their followers could read their message, although this restriction was announced to the user.[6]

Variations[edit]

Hellbanning: Where the targeted users are introduced to a variety of "errors" or bot control measures. Some examples of this would be:

  • "slowbanning", where problem users have loading delays introduced into every page they visit on the site, in the hope that their participation will be reduced.[1]
  • "errorbanning", when the problem user is served fake error messages at random as they browse the site.[1]

Coventry: The practice of allowing specific groups of users to see each others' posts within the "group" but not other users. Basically, allowing moderators to fence in and manage specific ideologies or behavior traits.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Lavelle, Peter (10 December 2016). "Ghost Banning on Social Media – the start of systematic censorship". The Duran. Retrieved 2 January 2017. 
  2. ^ a b Robert Walsh (12 January 2006). Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. Apress. p. 183. ISBN 978-1-4302-0114-4. So one of the things we did in FogBugz to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone is, well, you take their post and make it invisible to everyone else, but they still see it. They won’t know they’ve been deleted. There’s no one fanning their flame. You can’t get into a flame war if no one responds to your criticism. So they get silenced and eventually just go away. We have several ways of telling if they come back, and it’s been proven to be extremely, extremely effective. Say a spammer posts to your board and then they come back to check if it’s still there, and they see it—to them it’s still there—but no one else sees it, so they’re not bothered by it. 
  3. ^ a b Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009). "Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls". Wired magazine. Retrieved 6 July 2014. 
  4. ^ a b c Atwood, Jeff. "Suspension, Ban or Hellban?". Coding Horror blog. Retrieved 17 December 2011. 
  5. ^ "Manual installation of Citadel using source code and the command line client - Citadel.org". www.citadel.org. Retrieved 10 March 2017. 
  6. ^ a b Bohn, Dieter (2017-02-16). "One of Twitter's new anti-abuse measures is the oldest trick in the forum moderation book". The Verge. Retrieved 2017-02-17. 
  7. ^ Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014. 
  8. ^ "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando. 
  9. ^ "The Craigslist Lawsuit". Finally, it remains unresolved whether craigslist's well-recognized practice of "ghosting" (the hiding or interception of user postings and emails) without the users' knowledge or consent is legal or ethical. 
    Quoting: "Ghosting - Why don't my posts show up on Craigslist?". 
  10. ^ "How to Prevent Ghost Posting on Craigslist". Small Business - Chron.com. 
  11. ^ "Ghosting on Craigslist". 

External links[edit]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stealth_banning&oldid=770498997"