Chat with a librarian in Portland changed how I see platform shadowbanning

I was at the Multnomah County library last Thursday just browsing and got talking to one of the reference librarians. She mentioned she's been tracking how certain political hashtags don't show up in search results on X and Instagram anymore - not the official banned ones, just ones that criticize big tech. She showed me her spreadsheet with 20+ examples from the last 3 months. Honestly it hit different because she's not even mad about it, just calmly documenting everything like it's a normal thing to watch speech get quietly filtered. Kinda made me wonder how much we miss that just flies under the radar. Anyone else notice hashtags or keywords just stop working even though they're not on any policy list?

2 comments

2 Comments

smith.jordan26d ago

Have you tried running a few test searches in an incognito window while logged out? That's how I caught Instagram hiding posts about library funding for me a while back - they showed up fine when I wasn't signed in.

daniel55226d ago

Right? The exact same thing happened to me with local news articles, it's wild.