X has announced that from now on users will be notified when their posts have been "shadow-banned" - that is, shown to fewer people - because the company acted on a request from a government. The feature is an extension of the "Under the Hood" tool, which until now showed only what labels an account or post had received.

What is new is the precision. Users will be able to download a JSON file stating which of their posts were restricted in which country and which government requested it. The condition: at least ten posts that month. Until now that kind of restriction happened quietly - the post existed, but nobody saw it, and nobody knew why.

Keith Coleman, vice president of product at X, said of the feature that it is "the kind of thing I think people will be pretty shocked we are publishing". The XOpenSource account supplied the motive: "We expanded Under The Hood after seeing how much people value greater transparency in government-requested content filtering."

Governments have ready-made justifications for such requests - hate speech laws, terrorism-related content, electoral rules. Free-expression advocates have long warned that some states use those same frameworks for something else: silencing political opposition. The difference between the two is invisible from outside, which is exactly why the fact of who requested the ban is worth more than any statement of principles.

In the Balkans this is not an abstract subject. Here, decisions that shape public debate have for years been taken in rooms with no minutes, and the citizen learns something happened only from the consequences. A tool that says "your post was hidden, country X requested this" is a different kind of information from anything our institutions offer on their own initiative.

The obvious caveat remains. Transparency is being measured by the very party carrying out the restriction - X decides what goes into the file, and the same company previously published the code of the "For You" algorithm along with details of model configuration and ranking. That is more than any competitor offers. But a report written by the one doing the act is not oversight. The question no JSON resolves is whether the post should have been restricted in the first place.