How To Check (Automatically) If Instagram Shadowban You?
What is Instagram Shadowban?
The term shadowban is used to refer to instances where your posts are not appearing in the hashtag search results. This can directly impact the ability for non-followers to discover your profile and content resulting in lower engagement. In such cases, your posts may still be seen by existing followers, but not to anyone else. In few cases people also called it shadow-ban when they are not able to follow someone for a specific period of time, people following them but follow count is not increasing also when their Instagram stories are not visible to users when they use a particular hashtag because it was banned by Instagram.
Is the Instagram #Shadowban Killing Your Engagement?
Last week while researching for some tools, I came across a tool which can examine your latest 10 posts and let you know if you are doing anything wrong with your account or any hashtag is shadow-banning you. Instagram has been accused of “shadowbanning” users and posts starting about a year ago, preventing hash-tagged content from properly appearing in searches for those tags. After influencers and other users complained last year, someone made a tool for checking to see if you’ve been shadow-banned. But later that tool has been taken down.
Now there’s a new and improved one: Triberr’s Instagram Shadowban Test. This tool lets you test latest 10 posts in your account. The shadow ban applies to individual posts and may occur for various reasons. For example, overuse of a hashtag or a banned hashtag can trigger this occurrence. Therefore, this tool provide an analysis of your latest 10 posts so that you can easily identify culprits in your posts.
Here is an example of my Instagram account showing that all hashtags are fine and none of them are banned nor the account is shadow-banned.
Triberr’s Shadowban Logic
Firstly, the tester is a guide and not necessarily absolutely fact. That being said, there are two methods to consider here:
Test Tool’s Method: The tester checks the post’s meta data for each hashtag used on a post. If any hashtag is missing from the source code of the post’s page URL, then the test fails that hashtag. This is the best programmable method we’ve been able to determine thus far related to whether a post is getting full visibility within hashtag search results. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
Ideal / Perfect Method: Check Instagram hashtag search results directly for a specific post from an account that does NOT follow the account you’re reviewing. If the post is visible, then it’s fine. If it is not found, then it has been suppressed / shadowbanned. Of course, this is a more cumbersome approach as some hashtag search results are in the millions of results. Unfortunately, Instagram does not offer its API to perform this search programmatically.
In some cases, even we have seen that a post with a hashtag that our tool has flagged (because meta tag is not in source code) may still be visible in the hashtag search results. Meaning the tool did it’s job correctly and meta tag was missing from post’s source code, yet the post was visible in search results. Not perfect! but yet good option. Hence, use the tool as a guide not as fact.
You can check your account after 10 latest posts for regular results and improvements in your account.
There is another tool which let’s you check individual and unlimited posts of account I am testing right now; will share the insights next week if it worked well.
I suppose this will benefit some of us to experience a wider side of social media as a beginner. Do comment and let me know your thoughts or if any questions.
