Well, this isn't a 100% case of 'shadowbanning', but it sure did feel similar..
My dad has been putting adverts on Ebay to sell some of his rare vinyl music discs for over a decade and has aimed to put sound samples up of the music so that buyers know what they are getting. In some cases, the recordings literally don't exist anywhere else online, so people have no way of knowing what the music is without samples. He opted to use Dropbox as a file host and just add links into the advert to direct people to the music player in dropbox - it seemed to work fine... However...
He noticed a few days ago that he couldn't open the link to Dropbox in the adverts and after some investigation I discovered:
- The links DO open when he views the advert when logged in OR when viewing the adverts on a device he has previously logged in to ebay with - even if he views the adverts when logged out.
- If the adverts are viewed by other devices (tested from other locations) - the links to dropbox are inactivated.
This is very similar to the way that Youtube 'sandboxes' (effectively shadowbans) links put into youtube comments and also entire comments... Leaving the commenter thinking that their comment is being seen by the world, when it isn't. No notification is provided by Ebay or Youtube that this has happened, so no corrective action can be taken!
I spoke to Ebay's support team and the agent I spoke to contradicted herself several times - saying that no such links were allowed and hadn't been since 2017.. When I said I know that these links had worked in 2017-2019, she looked at the links policy and found it doesn't say what she thought it said. To cut a long story short, she didn't have a clue what the details of the issue were, but Ebay's policy says it's ok to post Youtube videos that contain reviews or product samples, so I did that..
I uploaded some audio as video to youtube and tried to embed it into Ebay. It all appeared to work, until I tried to view the advert from a remote location again - and the youtube video was no longer visible. Once again, they had removed the audio from the advert without telling me. Next up, I tried just posting a simple hyperlink to the youtube video, instead of embedding the video player and that actually worked. I thought I had found a solution.. But no...
The next day, Youtube informed me/him that his account was suspended for copyright and spam issues! I wrote to them stating that I believe that use of the audio material (no longer than 30 seconds per file) was fair use from a copyright perspective. They replied saying they were keeping the account suspended and made no more comment.
The ebay agent wasn't able to provide ANY video hosting sites that ebay whitelists, so I have no clue what other options I have! I tried to embed an audio HTML object into the page and it doesn't play in the final advert. At the moment, the only option I can use is to paste the URL to the audio file in Dropbox directly into the advert and have the user copy and paste the URL into a new tab to access the preview!
This is so dumb, I am constantly amazed at how poorly designed Ebay is from a technical perspective - honestly, they must make billions and their technology often seems like it was made by a teenager who's just starting out!
Anyway, I just thought to share this as I like to cover censorship and corporate stupidity - maybe it will inspire some solutions here!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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