Shadow banning, also called ghost banning in English or stealth banning.
In concrete terms, shadow banning consists of a community site or a social network banning or penalizing the visibility of a user's publications without the latter being able to realize it.
Shadow banning can be done in different ways, but the most common way is to make the publications concerned invisible or less visible while leaving them visible to the creator.
What is shadowban on Instagram?
On Instagram, the shadowban was initially introduced in order to fight against pornographic and homophobic content published on the platform.
Thus, accounts that publish photos or videos with specific hashtags cannot, if they are impacted by the shadowban, go up in the hashtag search results of publications.
For professionals who would misuse certain hashtags unrelated to their activity in an attempt to gain free visibility, this could concretely result in a sharp drop in the organic reach of their publications.
Now, Instagram's shadowban has been expanded to impact more accounts that violate Instagram's rules.
What actions can trigger a shadow ban on Insta?
When the social network for sharing photos, reels, IGTV, and stories notices “abnormal activity” on an account, it can algorithmically decide to set up this “stealth ban”.
Here are the main actions that can cause such a ban:
The use of third-party applications or bots that perform mass actions: all these applications that extol the merits of mass autoflow, mass liking, or mass commenting are potentially a shadow ban criterion if their use is detected by Instagram.
The use of hashtags “penalized” by Instagram: some hashtags are very badly seen by Instagram because they are often associated with spam. The use of the latter participle decreases the organic reach of the publications
Carrying out mass actions even without third-party tools: if you like more than 200 photos a day, post more than 60 comments a day or follow more than 60 people in less than an hour, there is a good chance that this arouses suspicions of Instagram and that the social network then penalizes the visibility of your publications in its search results and on its entire social network.
