shadow ban

As we know, social media platforms are extremely reluctant to ban users, partly from ideological, partly from commercial reasons.  If they find a post with content that is so bad that they have to do something, then they would prefer to shadow ban the account rather than outright ban it.  This means that they restrict profiles or hashtags from appearing in other accounts, they remove the account from search suggestions, they do everything they can to suppress an account and remove connections to other users.  They do all this without telling the original account holder so that, unless there is a suspicious drop in activity related to the account, the user whose content is in question, will not know that they are cut off.  The shadow ban can be for just a couple of days or it can last for a month or more, depending on the extent of the transgression, but its effect is to prevent a flow-on from the offending user to others who might then join in.

There is an associated term ghost ban which means the platform hides your comments or replies from other users.  The conversation thread is severed.