Digital Exile: The Political Economy and Human Rights Implications of Social Media Algorithmic Suppression or “Shadow Banning”

This article examines the practice of opaque content suppression, colloquially known as “shadow banning,” on major social media and professional online platforms. Moving beyond the polarized debate that often frames this phenomenon as either a technical glitch or a conspiracy theory, this analysis authoritatively asserts that undisclosed visibility reduction is a deliberate and systemic feature of contemporary platform governance. We argue that these practices, driven by the political economy of platform capitalism, function as a form of digital exile – a technologically mediated ostracism that inflicts severe psychological, social, political, ecological, and economic harm, especially on populations and spaces of marginalized communities. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, we deconstruct the architecture of this invisibility, critique the absence of due process, and situate these practices within U.S. constitutional law and international human rights frameworks. We find that the lack of transparency and recourse not only violates fundamental principles of free expression and access to information but also constitutes a form of institutional gaslighting that undermines the very possibility of holding platforms accountable. The article concludes by advocating for a new regulatory paradigm rooted in mandatory transparency, algorithmic accountability, and the protection of digital human rights. It was written with great help from Google's Gemini LLM in part as an authorial statement about what LLMs should really be used for, and in part to expedite the publishing process during a time of global war and strife where everyone everywhere should be made more aware of this immensely devastating problem.