shadowbanning – Alan Spicer – YouTube Certified Expert

A very common question that gets asked about YouTube is whether or not the platform can ban you from commenting on videos, and it can be a very misleading question for one simple reason; it is YouTube’s platform, they can do what they want. The more appropriate question, then, is does YouTube ban you from commenting on videos? And the answer is a little complicated.

Firstly, YouTube does not seem to be openly banning people from commenting. They may ban people from the platform entirely, but that’s a different matter. Of course, if you are banned from YouTube, you are banned from commenting.

Now, onto the trickier side of the topic.

Censored Comments

YouTube has been caught actively removing comments with specific words in them. This process appears to be automated and does not seem to carry any other penalty with it. That is, nobody seems to be getting banned or even warned about their comments. The comments just… disappear.

Crucially, however, those commenters can go on commenting after YouTube has decided to take one of them down. Not a ban, then. Of course, the phrases that YouTube has targetted here seem to be mostly bot-fodder, so maybe they are banning those accounts but no one is complaining about it because the banned accounts aren’t real.

Blocked Commenters

YouTube may not be banning people from commenting overall, but individual YouTubers can certainly ban you from commenting on their videos. Of course, this only affects you if you try to comment on that specific YouTuber’s content, and saying it affects you is being a bit loose with the term.

In reality, a YouTube block is more what is known of as a “shadowban”. In other words, your comments will be hidden from the YouTube channel and no one else will be able to see them, but you will still be able to make them and will have no way of discerning that you have been blocked other than guessing from the lack of engagement. Well, unless the YouTuber explicitly tells you, that is.

Shadowbanning (also called “muting” on other platforms) is an effective way to stop troublesome commenters because they don’t know they’ve been blocked. In contrast, if YouTube told you that you were banned from commenting on a specific channel, you might go and make a new YouTube account so that you could comment from there instead.

Disabled Comments

The other way in which your commenting abilities may be curtailed is when comments for a particular video are disabled entirely. YouTubers have the option to disable comments when they upload a video, but don’t worry, this isn’t just you. If comments are disabled, it’s affecting everyone the same.

Of course, a video with disabled comments may not be down to the YouTuber not wanting discussion of their content. YouTube will automatically disable comments on videos that are either made for children or prominently feature children. In these cases, the YouTuber will not have a choice about the comments, as YouTube’s terms state that content for children has to be treated in this manner.

I’ve Been Blocked, What Now?

As with any situation like this, the first thing to consider is whether the blocking reflects poorly on you. Sure, some YouTubers are just very easy with the block button, and the fact that you were blocked by them may say more about them than you. That being said, it can’t hurt to take a moment to truly think about how things unfolded. If, on balance, you find that the YouTuber was probably justified in blocking you, it may be something you will want to work on in future.

There are other possibilities, however. For example, you may conclude that the YouTuber was justified in blocking you, but you are still comfortable with the way you handled the situation and do not feel the need to change your behaviour. In this situation, there is little to be done but move on. You do not wish to change and the YouTuber does not wish to engage with you.

You may also conclude that you were being perfectly civil/reasonable and that the YouTuber was entirely out of line in blocking you. Once again, there probably isn’t much to be done. If you are a YouTuber of a similar size and you consider the point of contention important enough, you could perhaps open a dialogue that way, but the chances are you will once again have to put the situation behind you and move one.

One final note in this regard; if you are not sure who the reasonable party was, there is no harm in telling the tale to someone who can be unbiased and getting their opinion. Just remember that you will have to represent events fairly if you want to get a useful answer.

When I Should I Block?

That was all well and good for someone who has being blocked, but what if you’re the one doing the blocking? If you’re a YouTuber who is dealing with a commenter you would rather not be dealing with, when should you hit that block button?

The first thing to consider is whether the commenter is being disruptive or creating a negative experience for other commenters, or if they are just rubbing you the wrong way. It might be that they get on with your other viewers but you don’t like them, in which case we’d suggest leaving them be and just ignoring their comments. If they are making the experience bad for everyone, however, drop the banhammer!

The other thing to consider is what kind of community you want to foster. For example, if you are trying to run a family-friendly channel and a particular commenter repeatedly swears or says unsavoury things, it may be worth asking them to tone it down. If that fails, block.

For channels with large followings, this would obviously be an impractical approach, but if you set these ground rules early on when your channel is small, you will usually find that your community becomes self-policing once you start hitting the kind of numbers that are impossible to manage alone.

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Shadowbanning is one the more useful—and one of the more insidious—tools at the disposal of social media platforms today. Which of those you deem it to be will largely come down to how you use the platform, but it’s still nice to understand how things work, whether they affect you directly or not. But first, the title question;

Yes, YouTube can ban you from commenting. It’s worth remembering that YouTube is a private company and, for all the talk about what they might be doing, they can do whatever they want when it comes to how they manage their platform. If they believe you are violating their terms of service, they can remove you from that service. And they are entitled to change those terms at any time.

When it comes to shadowbanning, we can say with certainty that it exists on YouTube, largely because YouTubers have the power to shadowban commenters themselves. But we may be getting ahead of ourselves here; what is shadowbanning?

What Is Shadowbanning?

Shadowbanning is essentially the same as muting somebody on a social media platform, with the only real difference being that the platform itself is the one doing the muting, not other users.

Unlike blocking or banning someone, the shadowbanned user has no obvious way of checking whether they are shadowbanned. There are third-party services that check for this kind of thing. And, of course, you can always ask someone else on the platform, but without the help of an external party like that, a shadowbanned user will not be able to tell that they have been shadowbanned.

So what happens when you get shadowbanned? For you; nothing. You will be able to continue commenting as though nothing has changed. The difference is no one else will see your comments. To everyone else, it will be as though are just not commenting.

You may get suspicious when your comments are getting no engagement at all, but it will always be possible that people just aren’t paying attention to you.

Am I Shadow Banned On YouTube?

So, how do you tell if you are shadowbanned on YouTube? If you’re the kind of commenter that gets a lot of engagement most of the time and that engagement suddenly stops, you can probably assume you’ve been shadowbanned. If this sudden loss of engagement coincided with you saying something that might have violated YouTube’s community standards, you can up the likelihood of being shadowbanned.

If your comments are suddenly not getting engagement on a specific YouTuber’s videos, that YouTuber has likely decided to mute you from their comments. Unlike any kind of official shadowbanning from YouTube, being banned by a YouTuber doesn’t require any specific behaviour or rule violation. Effectively, YouTubers can shadowban anybody they like for any reason they like from their own channel.

In this case, your only recourses are to either try and contact the YouTuber outside of the comments section and ask them to rethink their decision, or to start up an alternate YouTube account to comment on those videos and try not to do whatever it was that made them shadowbanned you in the first place.

How To Avoid Getting Shadowbanned

The first thing to do is to make sure your comments don’t break any of YouTube’s guidelines. Any kind of abusive behaviour, hate speech, or harassment will likely land you with some kind of punishment, whether it be a suspension, shadowbanning, or outright banning from the platform entirely.

When it comes to being banned by YouTubers themselves, as we mentioned above, it’s entirely up to that YouTuber why they ban people. It could be for swearing in the comments of a family-friendly channel, it could be just that you have an avatar that the YouTuber doesn’t like. The comments section of their videos is there for them to shape, and YouTube does not impose any restriction on how they go about it.

For this reason, we can’t offer any universal advice for not getting banned by a YouTuber other than to not do anything that will rub the community the wrong way. If you’re new to the channel, hold back on commenting until you’ve gotten to know how things are a little. Once you have the lay of the land, you’ll know what you can say without ruffling any feathers in a way that the YouTuber in charge considers acceptable.

Does Shadowbanning Affect My Account?

To our knowledge, being banned from commenting by a YouTuber does not have a detrimental effect on your account as a whole, other than not being able to comment on that specific channel. That being said, if you go around getting yourself banned from every channel you comment on, it will hardly be good for your YouTube experience, and it may bring you to YouTube’s attention, causing them to take action of their own.

If you are shadowbanned by YouTube themselves, however, that means YouTube has already taken notice, and you should be wary of putting any more black marks on your record. A YouTube shadow ban may just be the beginning.

Final Thoughts

It’s often tempting to use words like “censorship” and “unfair” when talking about YouTube (or any social media platform) and their policies on banning or shadowbanning users. However, it is important to remember that these are private platforms, and they are not beholden to any particular standard when it comes to things like what they allow.

Of course, the world is constantly shifting in this technological age, and it may soon be the case that companies like YouTube have to allow certain (or remove) certain types of comments. For now, however, it is entirely up to YouTube how they manage user-generated content, including comments, and your primary recourse, if you don’t like the way they handle it, is to use another platform.

We realise this isn’t the most constructive recourse due to YouTube being so big, but that is the nature of the world. If you want to use YouTube, you have to play by YouTube’s rules, even if they seem unfair.