An end to shadow banning? Transparency rights in the Digital Services Act between content moderation and curation
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of "shadow banning" from a legal perspective, which is a content moderation sanction that is undetectable to those affected. The paper connects concerns about shadow banning to new visibility management techniques in content moderation, such as delisting and demotion. The EU Digital Services Act is analyzed as the first major legislation to regulate transparency of visibility remedies. The paper discusses possible interpretations and trade-offs for this regime and how to define visibility reduction as a category of content moderation actions. The concept of visibility reduction or "demotions" is central to both the shadow banning imaginary and the DSA's safeguards, but its meaning is far from straightforward. The paper shows how visibility reduction can still be regulated when defined as ex post adjustments to engagement-based relevance scores.