Facebook Just Got Granted A Patent On A Shadowbanning Feature

Just a couple of days ago, Facebook obtained a patent it applied for in February 2015, called “Moderating content in an online forum.” However, the title is just the cover for an actual term, “shadowbanning.”

The term “shadowbanning” has become favored among far-right and conservative interests who believe that they are undergoing ideological censorship under the control of social networks. Shadowbanning is when a user’s content gets completely hidden or demoted without them knowing.

Now, this is what Facebook’s patent says:

While congress makes mostly baseless inquiries into perceived social network bias and a Grand Old Party frothing at any evidence, regardless of how thin that supports that crusade, it’s a huge misstep when Facebook lays legal claim to automatic shadowbanning.

Like other patents, this one tries to cover related variations as much as it can, granting the power to shadowban on the moderator or creator of a forum, a machine learning classifier, or sentiment or text analysis software. Some examples of the deployment include derogatory, racist, or extremely negative comments and profane words. So this means the automated mass-hiding filter Facebook is using doesn’t work at all?

Facebook has been attempting to prevent borderline content from spreading on its apps, such as Instagram with an AI-powered initiative to address bullying. The first element is a feature conducting sentiment analysis on comments that may be rude as well as attempting to persuade users not to post them. Another feature that will come soon is closer to the description of shadowbanning in the patent, it allows users to set others as "restricted." This means when restricted users comment on restricting users' posts, their comments will be hidden to the restricting users and everyone else except for themselves.