My tweets just... stopped showing up. Took me 3 weeks to figure out what was happening.
Posting this in case anyone else is going through it rn. Been growing a small X account for ~8 months, building in public, posting 1-2x a day. Got to about 4K followers. Engagement wasn't huge but steady — most tweets got 1-5K impressions, replies got responses, sometimes one would do 30-50K.
Mid-March I posted what I thought was a solid thread. Got 80 impressions. Figured fine, bad post. Next one — 40 impressions. Then 60. Then a tweet that normally would've been a banger did 110. For ~10 days I assumed Twitter was just being weird, it does that sometimes. Then I realised I wasn't getting any new follower notifications either. Zero. Had been gaining 10-30 a week consistently and it just stopped.
Asked around. Two mutuals said they hadn't seen me on their TL in a while. A friend tried to @ me in a tweet and said my handle didn't auto-complete in the mention dropdown.
That's when I actually started worrying. Spent an hour reading "am I shadowbanned" threads. Half were people being paranoid, half had real issues. The problem is X never tells you. No notification, no warning, nothing in settings.
Eventually ran my handle through SocialCal's Twitter Shadowban checker. Free, ~10 seconds, no login or password. Tests 4 things, whether you show up in search, whether your tweets appear in other people's timelines (ghost ban), whether your replies are deboosted inside threads, and whether you're stuck behind the "show more replies" wall (QFD).
Came back clean on search but flagged on reply deboost and QFD. So my own tweets were technically fine but every reply I made on bigger accounts was getting buried. That explained the impressions collapse — like 60% of my reach used to come from replies on bigger accounts, not my own posts.
Looked back at what I'd done in the days before. I'd posted a kind of spicy reply on a politics-adjacent thread. Got into a back-and-forth with someone who almost certainly reported me. Auto-muted a bunch of spammers in a 24h window. Some combo of those most likely.
What I did:
- Stopped replying to anything for 3 days, just lurked
- Deleted the spicy reply + a couple of borderline ones
- Slowed posting from 2x/day to 1x every other day for a week
- Re-ran the checker every 2-3 days to track if it was clearing
Reply deboost cleared after ~12 days. QFD took another week. Impressions are back to roughly 70-80% of where they were, still climbing.
Stuff I wish I'd known sooner:
It's often not a "real" ban. Sometimes it's a soft penalty triggered by getting muted/blocked/reported by a bunch of accounts in a short window. Bot reports count too apparently. Don't appeal. Half the threads I read said appealing made it worse. The auto-system just seems to wait it out.
The shadowban itself isn't even the worst part, not knowing you have one is. If you check periodically you catch it in days instead of wasting a month posting into the void. Anyone else dealt with this? curious how long yours took to clear and whether you ever figured out the trigger.