In a recent industry seminar on social media engagement, someone posed the question: What even is shadow banning?

If you are an adult industry-related personality or brand looking to build and sustain a social media presence in 2018, you absolutely must be aware of shadow banning.

The (brief) History of Shadow Banning

It started to happen last year: All of a sudden, mysterious hashtag errors were occurring on Instagram. This would mark the first stage of what would eventually come to be known as as shadow banning, stealth banning or ghost banning.

Shadow banning is the act of blocking a user or their content from an online community such that the user does not realize that they have been banned. By making a user’s contributions invisible or less prominent to other members/users of the platform, the hope is that the banned user will become bored or frustrated in the absence of engagement and reactions and leave the site.

In the early days of shadow banning, users began to complain about hashtags not working. They reported adding popular hashtags to a picture. The photo was visible on the hashtag page for the user who posted it and also for their followers, but unfortunately not for users who did not follow the channel. This is obviously a huge issue because the whole point of hashtags is to place yourself and your content in a larger conversation for new people to discover.

How Shadow Banning Impacts Your Account

Though no one can say precisely say why shadow banning began, at this point it is somewhat irrelevant. What matters is how it impacts your account and what raises the flag in the first place. Business to Community reported some theories.

Instagram does not notify users that they have been banned. According to the Business to Community report, users impacted by a shadow ban report a noticeable decline in overall engagement, with only their current followers engaging with their content. New follower growth will slows down.

According to Business to Community, the following may increase the likelihood of a shadow ban: use of certain hashtags; binge liking, following and unfollowing; fake followers; and the use of automation tools. Let’s break each one down.

Hashtag Use

Obviously, Instagram tries to ban explicit content from the platform. This includes “violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content.” Instagram, therefore, completely censors certain hashtags that obviously violate its terms of use like #horny, #booty or #porn.

According to Business to Community, it’s surprising that inoffensive hashtags like #elevator, #easter, #workflow and #kansas appear on the list of restricted hashtags as well. In fact at some point, #kansas, #workflow and #beautyblogger displayed no results on Instagram.

Users have also reported that other highly popular and frequently used hashtags have been shadow banned — tags that are used excessively and therefore oftentimes hit by bots and fake accounts. Furthermore, some users seem to have trouble when copy/pasting hashtags into their description instead of typing them in manually.

Binge Liking and Follow/Unfollow

Liking an excessive amount of pictures and following and unfollowing a lot of accounts in a short time period might cause Instagram to classify you as a bot. Instagram limits the actions users can take on the platform, including liking photos, leaving comments and following/unfollowing accounts. This is supposed to reduce spam.

Fake Followers

Obviously, purchasing followers does not sit well with Instagram. The social network is pretty diligent in terms of monitoring and deleting fake accounts. Purchasing fake followers on a large-scale basis will draw attention to one’s channel too, increasing the chances of shadow banning and an overall ban of your account.

Automation Tools

Automation tools that help grow a following usually hit popular and frequently used hashtags. Shadow banning these hashtags could well be Instagram’s way of fighting automation on the platform, since these clearly violate Instagram’s terms of use.

Instagram, like most social media, is a double-edged sword. Invaluable, but also fickle and totally out of your control. Engaging social media like Instagram is essentially mandatory, as is engaging it with caution.