Facebook has been the leading social networking and social media site since the mid-2000s. Despite increasing competition, it remains the most popular social networking site, with participation of a reported 1.98 billion people – almost a third of the world’s population. This gives the site a high level of influence on public opinion, although the spread of information through the platform is also associated with individual choices and with the site’s algorithms. Despite the popularity and fame of the network, there is much about it that few users know or understand.
Businesses, individuals, and organizations have flocked to Facebook for purposes such as branding, outreach, the creation of communities with customers or partners, advertising, traditional marketing, viral marketing, click generation, and so on. These users believe their own page and the groups they run belong to them: that inside the Facebook network, they own something. In fact, Facebook continues to own the entire network, and simply lets people use it for free. It makes the site available as a tool, so it can obtain benefits of its own from user traffic. Facebook is a large and complex system, which contains many mysteries and secrets which are not revealed to the casual user. One such secret is the “shadow ban”.
A “shadow ban” is a type of ban in which a particular article or publication can still be published by users, but it will no longer be visible to their friends or followers. It will not appear in an individual’s newsfeed. The reach of such material is then reduced by a factor of 10 or more. For the average user, this is little more than an inconvenience: they might repost something and it is not seen. For businesses, however, restricting publication has serious negative consequences. A company might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the content, design, and management of an item which they intend to be shared and seen, and they suffer losses if the item is shadow banned and cannot be seen. If this occurs repeatedly, it can be fatal for a business. In addition, it sometimes happens that eventually the shadow bans contribute to formal sanctions, and someone tries to log in only to find their account is deleted or all advertising is banned on their page.
On February 18, 2021, an expert meeting was held at the Kyiv office of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine under the patronage of the of Information Security Institute, on the subject of how to make Facebook give a good grade to a page, how to make it able to give out publications in recommendations, how to defeat the echelon system based on its algorithms, and about what you need to know and be able to become a winner on Facebook.
At the meeting, practical examples were given of what it takes to make a project have an organic reach of millions of people. A certain system was explained, based on the research of the last prophet of Europe, Jean Baudrillard, and was designed by the scientific director of the Information Security Institute, Dr. Oleg Maltsev. This approach has two parameters, a scientific approach and an understanding of Facebook systems. It allows users to solve the most complex problems effectively.
