Louise Brown: ‘Shadow banning’ is censorship by algorithm | Conservative Home

Louise Brown has been a parliamentary candidate, is a teacher, and Director of Educational Partnerships. She is a broadcaster on local radio. 

A few weeks ago, I was at a talk in Oxford – an event where academics rubbed shoulders with activists, students and people like me who, I confess, was not particularly up on the background of Paul Marshall, the speaker, but who was intrigued by the topic and conveniently worked five minutes away.

I came away better informed and also curious about a term that was new to me: “shadow banning.” The point made was simple – big tech firms don’t need to ban you outright, they just strangle your content, quietly, invisibly, and without recourse. It’s censorship by algorithm.

This isn’t just about X or TikTok. It’s about the creeping sense that the public is being managed. That the news we see, the debate we’re allowed, and the outrage we’re nudged toward, are all part of a carefully stage-managed performance and, crucially, that both the media and the political class are in on it.

It’s no wonder voters are losing trust, not just in the media, but in the system itself.

Take the BBC. There’s a lot about it that is still great. But when the same organisation that helps set the political tone also controls its own “fact-checking” service, BBC Verify, alarm bells ring. If they want to continue to be taken seriously and to be truly accountable to their audience, can they both set and mark their own homework?

Has this become more apparent since the birth of social media and the endless highway of information? No doubt. Pressure groups aid it. Stop Funding Hate, or ‘Stop Funding People We Hate’ as Marshall referred to them, has built a slick operation around getting companies to pull adverts from media outlets they don’t like. It’s not some cheerful grassroots movement, it’s coordinated pressure, dressed up as virtue.

The tactic is simple: harass brands until they give in, and because most corporate boards are risk-averse when it comes to reputation, it works. The free market should provide the answer here, and there are exceptions when this is the case (take the eventual collaboration between Marks and Spencer and GB News), but corporate cowardice can more often get in the way. Safer to keep your head down and your brand out of trouble.

Ofcom’s mailbox, meanwhile, is flooded, mostly from one political direction. Not necessarily because that side is always right, but because they’ve claimed the moral high ground. The regulators get a warped impression of what ‘outrage’ really looks like, or choose to call it something else.

This isn’t all coming from the progressive Left though. Right-wing populism has learned how to play the game just as well. Trump, JD Vance, even Reform in the UK have learned to harness public anger without actually doing much to rebuild trust. It turns out ideology and values matter less than narrative control, and narrative control now comes via digital platforms that shape what we see and what quietly disappears.

It’s not surprising that disenfranchised citizens are migrating to podcasters like Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. They’re popular because they don’t sound like they’ve been handed a brief. There’s room to ramble, get things wrong, and still come off as authentic. It’s not always pretty or truthful. But it’s real.

These days those seeking an opportunity for raw debate are often disappointed – although I can very much vouch for it happening in the institutions I have been connected with. They’re tired of the feeling that everyone is now performing to a pre-written script.

It seems pertinent to reference C.S. Lewis at this time, seeing one of his favourite hostelries was only a stone’s throw away from the venue where I was being enlightened. He saw something like this coming. In The Abolition of Man, he warned what happens when we lose faith in objective truth and lean into sentiment instead. We’re there now.

Feelings have become political currency and tech platforms aren’t challenging that, they’re monetising it. Evidence-based political decisions are what the scientists would have us adopt, but I would add a note of caution as there is always a place for ‘just sentiments’. It’s just the definition of ‘just’ seems to have been hijacked by ego. Truth, a bit like the markets, needs contention to survive.

So what’s the answer? Firstly if a platform is suppressing or boosting content based on editorial judgement, it’s a publisher and it should be transparent about how it operates. Free access to algorithms would be a start. More importantly, we need accountability for those who benefit from media distortion while pretending to oppose it. If you’re surfing a populist wave by curated outrage, then maybe at least own it.

It has been suggested that the printed news media, in this country at least, is more pluralistic than most, even today. This old newspaper model has its flaws, of course, but there is strict editorial control and you know what The Guardian stands for, or what The Telegraph is pushing.

Unfortunately, most people, especially the young, now get news through feeds that don’t tell you who picked the stories or why. Algorithms quietly learn what you like, and feed it back to you on loop. Unless you actively seek out opposing opinions, it requires little intellectual effort. The newspaper model, and they too have expanded their reach through other media, may still be more pluralist, but the concern is, who is reading them?

My main takeaway is that this isn’t just a media problem. It’s a democracy problem. When the conditions for free, open debate are eroded, voters don’t just lose trust. They lose the tools to think clearly, challenge power, and make informed choices.

We don’t need more censorship. We need more courage. From editors, yes. But also from executives, voters, and anyone willing to say what they actually think. It has to be okay to be wrong, or controversial, or to question the mood of the moment.

If the mainstream can’t offer that, if it becomes too filtered, too tame, too scared of its own shadow then people will go looking elsewhere.

The risk is then, that they end up somewhere worse.

In the end, this isn’t just about who controls the news. It’s about who gets to define reality.