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Social media platform X/Twitter appears to be “shadow banning” accounts that are critical of Elon Musk, a report has suggested.
Despite professing to be a staunch believer in free speech, it seems that Musk doesn’t like it much when people use his social media platform to criticise him – and doing so might get your account secretly limited.
According to a report from the New York Times (NYT), three right-wing accounts that got into an online spat with X/Twitter owner Musk in December 2024 found their account engagement “practically vanish overnight”.
The operatives of those accounts claim their posts received far less engagement than was typical and in some cases they never recovered. They believe it was due to their accounts being shadow banned by X/Twitter’s admin.
Significantly lower than average engagement can be the result of shadow banning – when an online account is purposely limited, suppressed or blocked from other people’s feeds without their knowledge.
“This is working against the type of environment that he (Musk) claimed he wanted to build,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for technology policy at the advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“Don’t sit here and cloak yourself in the First Amendment and free speech, and then do things like that.”
One right-wing account run by Anastasia Maria Loupis, with over 1 million followers, used to receive hundreds of thousands of views per day.
But, when she publicly disagreed with Musk on his stance for allowing skilled immigrants to the US for work, their engagement dropped off massively to within the low ten thousands, according to NYT analysis.
To confirm her suspicions, Loupis created a new account on X and found even that account got far more engagement than her established one.
“If he did it to small accounts, nobody would notice,” Loupis said. “But when he starts doing it to really, really big influencers with millions of followers, everybody notices.”
Far-right influencer Laura Loomer also experienced a drop in engagement after clashing with Musk on the same issue, and was also briefly stripped of her “verified” status.
Looner said: “I think it’s wrong to say it’s a free speech platform and then shut off people’s ability to monetize.”
indy100 has contacted X/Twitter for comment.
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