Mastering an Instagram Ban

If you start with a new Instagram account, things will not be as easy as it was a few years ago. Sooner or later you will ask yourself one question:

How can my channel grow faster?

I too wanted to take the fast track. In doing so I got some bans from Instagram. In this article I would like to present you my learnings and the solutions that worked for me.

Instagram Bots, the supposedly quick solution

If you enter “Instagram follower” in Google, ads and search results of bot vendors and services that want to sell you followers will appear very quickly.

I also wanted to give my pretty new channel a little boost and wanted to automate some things. I didn’t use any of the services myself, but used an “unofficial Instagram API” directly.

Unofficial Instagram API to give you access to ALL Instagram features (like, follow, upload photo and video, etc) (Instagram-API-python)

With this API written in Python, it was possible to like posts, follow / unfollow people and also upload photos directly to Instagram. Actually a perfect starting point to automate some tasks on Instagram.
The API itself is for testing purposes only and should really not be used with an active account. Because an account lock, action lock or shadowban can be the result.

I have been through it all myself.
And here are my learnings from it.

There are different types of Strikes on Instagram.

Blocking actions

If you overdo certain actions such as like, follow, comment, posting with an account, then you get a time ban for these actions. There are certain limits for Instagram per day, which are simply not exceeded. Especially for new accounts and accounts that are not verified with a phone number, it happens very fast that you get such a block.

What helps?

Here it helps in most cases to wait one or two days until actions can be carried out again.

Temporary blockage

If you have exaggerated, a temporary lockdown is possible. That means you can’t do anything with your account during this time. This usually happens when you hit the limits for certain actions several times or when you use known bots and unofficial APIs.

What helps?

You can just wait here. The period I had here was a week. You should not access your account and you should not log in again.

Shadowban

One of the hardest locks for me, besides the complete account lock, is the so-called Shadowban.

What is the Shadowban?

With a Shadowban, your activities on Instagram have very little visibility. For example, if you post something new, you won’t be displayed under the new hashtags. Your comments may be displayed to fewer users and you simply lose reach.

Your posts will only be shown to people who follow you. If you have a new account, this account will be dead and it will not help you to use the hashtags to generate new followers.

How do I detect a Shadowban?

You can recognize a Shadowban by several characteristics:

• Decrease in average comments and likes on your posts
• You are no longer found on the latest tags
• You’re not getting as many new followers as usual.

You can easily check a Shadowban:

• Post a picture with a hashtag that you’re usually found with
• Ask a friend to check out the latest posts of the hashtag. The account must not follow you. If he doesn’t find a post by you, your account has got a shadowban.

Why do you get a Shadowban?

• You used bots
• You have bought followers / likes / comments
• You use hashtags that are on a blacklist
• Your interactions with Instagram are not “normal”: you follow or follow certain people all at once or like 200 posts at once and no interaction happens in between.
• You have already received some time or action blocks before
• Your account has been reported too often
• You log in via an IP / device that already contains other accounts with locks. This is my theory.

How do I get rid of a Shadowban?

First you should test what kind of Shadowban you have.

Use of a wrong hashtag:

For this purpose there is a tool which helps you to identify blacklisted hashtags on your account: https://triberr.com/instagram-shadowban-tester

• Test your account with the tool.
• Next, you should edit or preferably delete these postings
• Create new postings without hashtags
• Then create postings with a few hashtags, where you are sure that they are not blacklisted
• Give all the time

A hashtag Shadowban is not so bad because you can’t know yourself which hashtags are banned or which are not.

To find out which hashtag is possibly on a blacklist, simply search for the hashtag on the instagram page and scroll down to the bottom:
https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/iphonegraphy/

If it says the following:

Recent posts from # iphonegraphy are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines. Learn more

I would not use the hashtag.

Getting rid of Shadowban — here we go!

If you didn’t use a blocked hashtag, then I show you here the instructions how I got rid of the Shadowban

• Find out that you really did not use a hashtag that was blacklisted
• Verify your account with a mobile phone number. This will give Instagram another signal that it is not a spam account
• Confirm the SMS that Instagram sends you
• Clear all connections to any APIs like Later etc. To do this, go to Settings -> Apps and Websites and remove all connections

• Go to “Settings -> Report a problem” and describe in detail what your problem is. Here I would also mention that you may have used a bot and will not do so again.
• Now log off completely from all devices. Smartphone, website, apps.
• Do not use the account for one week. If you also have a “temporary lockout”, do not use the account until it expires and do not use it for another two days.
• After that, log in to your account again with only one device
• Wait another day
• Start with few interactions. The important thing here is to make it look natural. So follow some Likes, comments and maybe a profile. Do not use bots for this.
• After one or two days post a picture again. Do not use hashtags
• You just repeat the whole thing with 2–3 posts.
• Use stories to promote the posts again
• Now post a picture with a hashtag that does not have too much range
• Test again if you appear in the latest posts about the hashtags
• Mostly your posts will then be displayed there again.

That’ s what I was doing, at least.

If you use Instagram yourself, you will find that rather many of these “Follow/Unfollow” bots are used by profiles. Of course the Instagram doesn’t want to, and that’s why there are the penalties and the shadowban. Just try to be a bit more careful with a penalty or shadowban next time. It is a kind of warning from Instagram, because next time the whole account could be completely locked.

I hope I could help you a little bit with this article. If you liked it, then please give me some claps :)