Lizzo Says She’s ‘Officially Shadow Banned’ on TikTok: ‘This App Getting Wack’
Lizzo thinks it’s about d–n time for TikTok to stop excluding her videos from its algorithm. In a recent video, the hitmaker told her followers that she thinks the platform has shadow banned her after noticing that her posts have been performing suspiciously better on Instagram than on TikTok in terms of view counts.
“I’m officially shadow banned, because how did I post this on Instagram and it already has 135 thousand views?” she said, showing proof that a video of her dancing at one of her concerts raked in hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram within 30 minutes of being posted.
The “Truth Hurts” singer had posted that same concert video to TikTok, where she says it got significantly less attention. At the time of publication, the video has nearly 160,000 views, and many fans commented that they only saw it after being directed from Lizzo’s follow-up video about being shadow banned.
The video posted to her account immediately before the dance video — a vlog in which she talks about recovering from a recent illness — also has just over 100,000 views, considerably less than her usual view count of anywhere between 500,000 and several million.
“This app getting wack,” Lizzo captioned her latest post.
Billboard has reached out to TikTok for comment.
According to The New York Times, “shadow banning” is “the perception — real or imagined — that social media companies are taking stealth actions to limit a post’s visibility.”
The comments on Lizzo’s video on the topic seem to provide some evidence for the singer’s claims, with some followers writing that they haven’t been seeing her videos on their For You pages recently. “I’m definitely seeing you less on here and I don’t like it!” said one fan.
“Seriously!” commented another. “We don’t see you anymore and always have to go to your page or following to see if you have new stuff!”
See Lizzo’s video below:
Hannah Dailey
Billboard
