  Recently, Tsupko et al. have put forward the very interesting proposal to use
the shadows of high-redshift supermassive black holes (SMBHs) as standard
rulers. This would in principle allow us to probe the expansion history within
a redshift range which would otherwise be challenging to access. In this note,
we critically examine this proposal, and identify a number of important issues
which had been previously overlooked. These include difficulties in obtaining
reliable SMBH mass estimates and reaching the required angular resolution, and
an insufficient knowledge of the accretion dynamics of high-redshift SMBHs.
While these issues currently appear to prevent high-redshift SMBH shadows from
being used as robust standard rulers, we hope that our flagging them early will
help in making this probe theoretically mature by the time it will be
experimentally feasible.
