Shadowban Check

Every check is run from accounts that do not follow the one being checked, because X personalises what you see. Logged in as yourself you always appear in your own search and your replies are always visible to you, so the only way to find out what a stranger sees is to ask as a stranger.

We ask X for the accounts it suggests when someone types that exact name, and look for this one among them. The question is only whether it comes back: if X offers a list of similar names without this account in it, nobody searching for it would be offered it.

We search X for posts by the account and see whether any come back, but only if it has actually posted in the last 45 days, because an account with nothing to find is not a banned one. An empty result is checked a second time before it counts, so one bad read cannot accuse anybody.

We take the account’s recent replies written inside other people’s conversations, then open those conversations the way a stranger would and look for the replies there. Replies inside its own threads are skipped, because those are always visible and would hand back a free pass. When the posts are missing from search as well, we also check whether the account’s own posts still appear above the replies they received.

When a reply is not in a conversation’s main list, we follow X’s own "Show probable spam" link and look for it there. Found behind that link means X is hiding the reply rather than hiding the account, which is a different thing from a ghost ban and is reported separately.

We take the median views of the account’s own recent posts and work out what share of its followers that is.

That share is then compared with other accounts of the same size, from a sample of real accounts we measured the same way and grouped by follower count, because a 300k-follower account reaches a far smaller share of its followers than a 2k one. We also compare the account with its own earlier posts, so a week where views collapsed shows up even when the share itself looks normal.

Posts under 24 hours old are left out, because they have not finished earning their views. An account whose posts get single-digit views gets no reading at all: a swing of one or two readers would move the whole figure.