A shadow ban on Instagram is a restriction imposed by Instagram on user accounts for violating the terms of use of this social network.
The restriction is imposed without warning or notification to the account owner and is specifically aimed at reducing audience reach, account engagement, and limiting the display of your content to followers and regular Instagram users.
When you are shadowbanned, geolocation searches by hashtags and other users’ tags become unavailable to you. This means that free promotion methods on Instagram are off-limits to you. Also, while you are shadowbanned, your posts will not be visible in your followers’ feeds.
In this article, you will learn more about what a shadow ban on Instagram is, how to recognize it, and how to get out of a ban on Instagram on your own.
Why does an account get shadow banned on Instagram?
First, let’s talk about the main reasons for being banned on Instagram.
The bottom line is that Instagram’s technical support does not deny the existence of such a restriction for violating the social network’s rules as a shadow ban on Instagram, but the algorithms for banning are still unknown.
So how can you tell if you are shadow banned on Instagram? We have prepared a list of the key reasons for blocking. Read them and check yourself against each point. This will help you understand whether you are at risk of being banned.
Using services to automate Instagram
These include services such as:
- mass liking,
- mass following,
- Direct messaging,
- auto-posting (to a lesser extent).
Instagram reads the use of such services as suspicious activity and sends accounts to the Instagram shadow ban for using them.
And even after the Instagram API was changed in April 2018 to restrict access to such services, some of them were able to bypass the platform’s restrictions.
By the way, you don’t have to worry too much when using auto-posting services: these services make fewer requests to the Instagram API compared to other services.
In conclusion, to avoid being banned, do not use fake likes, comments, and followers.
Frequent addition of identical hashtags
If you use the same hashtags (more than 30) under each post and duplicate them in the comments, Instagram will perceive such actions as spam. Branded hashtags are no exception. The social network welcomes the use of unique content: texts, photos, and hashtags included.
Frequent user complaints about your account
It is difficult to determine how many complaints and for what reason a ban is issued. But one thing is clear: Instagram strictly monitors the maintenance of a friendly community, so complaints can be a reason for shadowbanning your profile.
Exceeding limits on the number of likes, comments, and follows.
Instagram imposes temporary filters on each action. Limits can be daily or hourly. However, there is no official data or statistics on these restrictions.
Instagram will definitely consider the following actions to be suspicious activity:
- subscribing to or unsubscribing from multiple accounts per day,
- hundreds of comments in a short period of time,
- liking a large number of posts per hour.
The social network will consider these actions as the use of automation services on Instagram, even if you did everything manually and independently.
