If you type the word “marijuana” into the search bar at Facebook today, you might be surprised at what comes up. Rather, you might be surprised at how little comes up.

Last night, Marijuana Moment writer Chris Roberts noticed that these pages are not showing up when you search on Facebook. The pages still exist, and if you have the URL for them, you can still visit them. But if you don’t know where they are, Facebook is not going to tell you.

This is what’s called “shadow banning.” Rather than deleting or censoring pages, Facebook is making them hard or impossible to find.

This shadow ban went so far as to block searches for the California Bureau of Cannabis Control, the agency that oversees the regulation of the legal recreational marijuana industry in the state. Roberts notes that their Facebook page is a clearing house of information on upcoming meetings and regulatory decisions. A spokesman told Roberts they have not gotten an explanation from Facebook as yet as to why this was happening to them.

See the original article at Reason