How do you know you’ve been shadowbanned? You may be tweeting, but you’re no longer being heard. You wonder if maybe people just aren’t interested in what you have to say.

But they might be interested. Twitter just isn’t interested in letting them read your messages.

Shadowbanning is the censorship that social media companies do in the shadows. It’s cowardly and dishonest. And it’s how the big firms get away with covertly censoring conservatives.

“The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content,” Abhinav Vadrevu, a former Twitter employee, explains in Project Veritas’ undercover investigation of the company.

“They just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”

Shadowbanning is the perfect metaphor for the big lie of social media. The big companies claim to empower you while they actually take away your voice. And they do it without you realizing it.

Or as Olinda Hassan, Twitter’s Policy Manager for Trust and Safety put it, “It’s something we’re working on where we’re trying to get the s___ people not to show up.”