Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting, is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community so that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned. For instance,
shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.
By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the
problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or
frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will not create new accounts.
