Twitter Shadowban?

Update 03/19/21: Our shadowban appears to be mostly lifted. We still have “Reply Deboosting” applied to our account but will show up in searches. Hoping this does not become an issue in the future.


If you follow us on Twitter and have found us to be pretty quiet for the past week, it’s not us. We’ve been posting frequently, working to educate people about other providers and collect responses to our survey.

Alas, Twitter appears to have at least temporarily restricted our account visibility. See the ShadowBan test below.

While we can see our own tweet replies, anyone else looking at the reply cannot.

Even beyond that, our Twitter Analytics show engagement (retweets/reads/likes) dropped to 0 for the past week.

To be transparent, the reason this likely occurred is due to our use of pre-written responses. I would find tweets with users complaining about Optimum, and ask them to complete our survey and support the effort, which many were very interested in.
This had been one of our most helpful methods of outreach to a key demographic of followers.

Examples of some of the pre-written tweets I have saved.

We here find the shadowban rather hypocritical of Twitter, as the @Optimum and @Optimum_Help Twitter accounts (to our observation, operated by bots) have been allowed to tweet and reply to anyone without any restriction in order to sell their service.

In many cases, we’ve even found Optimum replying to someone from far outside the Tri-State area trying to sell service! In one example, the individual was not asking for service but used the word “terrible”, which we suspect triggered the Optimum bot to respond, assuming a complaint about “terrible” internet service.

We are going to challenge this shadow-ban however we can. If anyone knows an attorney who would be interested in taking this case (pro-bono if possible), please email us at info@tscfis.org.

Thanks as always for your continued support!

3 responses

  1. Optimum does operate outside of the tri state area. They are in 23 states under the Suddenlink brand name including California.

    1. True, though I’d imagine they would use @suddenlink in those regions? I’ve seen @optimumhelp tweet people as far away as California, which is far outside even Suddenlink’s region.

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