Shadow Banning: Are You a Victim and What to do About it

Banned
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Online censorship is becoming an increasingly pressing issue considering how active the largest tech companies have been in filtering certain points of view out of mainstream discussion on their platforms. In recent years, this practice has become quite overt, leading to many segments of society pushing back in these practices.

In response, these platforms have attempted to reorient their filtering techniques by using more indirect methods that are difficult to catch and point out. The has led to the rise of the term “shadow banning”. Shadow banning is where online personas are not actually banned from a platform outright, but the platform restricts their outreach and therefore influence in more subtle ways.

This could include making changes to their algorithm specifically for pages and personas that they wish to contain to the point where their regular viewership drops substantially because most people no longer see this persona’s content anymore. Quite often, this happens without the persona knowing about it or even noticing it until the damage has been done. As such, it behooves those who make a living online to be able to notice the signs of being shadow banned and what to do about it.

Getting Unbanned

Knowing how to get unbanned from Omegle and other chatting or social media platforms can be very important, especially if you are a social influencer or are one of the many people making their living entirely online. The opportunities the internet has created for younger people especially has been quite remarkable.

The downside to this is that you are putting your career at the mercy of large tech platforms that might not have your best interests at heart. One useful habit to have if you are one of these people is to regularly check your online usage and viewer statistics. Most of these platforms will provide this tool for those with a large enough audience or even anyone of their users.

A big red flag for the possibility of having been shadow banned is a sudden and unexplained drop in number of subscribers and/or viewers of your content. Once that has been identified, the task will be to find ways of overcoming this before the damage to your page and consequently your career is irreversible.

Getting a VPN

Having a high-quality VPN subscription is increasingly in the vogue nowadays. A VPN subscription awards you the benefits of online anonymity from intelligence agencies, hackers, search engine databases and basically any unscrupulous third party who wants to know more about you than you care to divulge.

The two main features of a good VPN are encryption protection and alternate IP address selection. The encryption protection provides a systematic scrambling of any exchange of information going to or from a protected device. This means hackers are still able to intercept the exchange, but all they will be getting is unreadable encrypted data. The data is only unscrambled when it reaches its intended destination.

The alternate IP address selection adds to this privacy protection by allowing users to choose from a list of alternate IP addresses from around the world. Once the user has settled on a choice, all exchanges will not only be systematically encrypted, but will also be rerouted through one of the servers located at the IP address the user has selected.

A Way Out

It is primarily using an alternate IP address that a person who has been banned or shadow banned from a site like Omegle can hope to find reprieve. If you have been banned or shadow banned from Omegle or a similar platform, simply activate a good VPN subscription and select an alternate IP address from their list, preferably one far away from your actual location.

The VPN will then do its magic and, through rerouting your exchanges, make it look as if you are operating from that IP address. This is very important because Omegle has a mechanism that bans or shadow bans your IP address.

So, instead of moving to a different zip code, all you need to do is use a good VPN to give off the look that you are somewhere else. This is enough to get yourself unbanned from Omegle and any other site that uses the same monitoring mechanism, allowing you to push back on censorship efforts against you.

Time to Fight Back

At the end of the day, these are largely private companies that face little to no legal restrictions in who they can kick off their platforms. Regardless of their reasons, what matters to you is how to circumvent these mechanisms, and hopefully reading this will help you achieve that goal.

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