Visibility Filtering

Visibility Filtering, or VF, is a doublespeak term for shadow banning. It is the act of reducing the amount of views a post gets on social media by the company that owns the platform. Examples are: blocking searches of individual users; limiting the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; blocking select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from being included in hashtag searches.

“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.