How to Get Unshadowbanned on Instagram

If you have noticed that you are suddenly getting significantly less engagement than you used to get, you might be shadowbanned.

While it could be anxiety-provoking to see your engagement drop dramatically, we are going to let you know how to get unshadowbanned on Instagram to return your engagement to what it used to be.

What Is a Shadowban on Instagram?

Before we get into how you can remove an Instagram shadowban, we will go over what exactly a shadowban is.

While not an official term that Instagram uses, a “shadowban” becomes apparent when you see a sudden and drastic reduction in engagement, reach, and visibility of your content within the app. Instagram will not tell you whether you were shadowbanned or not, but you will see the effects of shadowbanning in your engagement metrics.

Once you are shadowbanned by the platform, even people following you are not going to see your content. The amount of likes, comments, shares, and views are all going to significantly drop. It doesn’t matter if you have a personal or professional account, there will be a major reduction in engagement.

How to Know if You’re Shadowbanned on Instagram

As we mentioned before, Instagram will not inform you if you have been shadowbanned. In fact, they deny that shadowbanning exists, but many users have shared evidence that it does. If you want to find out whether your IG account has been shadowbanned or not, here is what you can do:

1. Open the Instagram app
2. Tap on your profile picture in the bottom-right of the screen
3. Tap on the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines)
4. Under the For professionals section tap on Insights
5. From here, view how many accounts you reached, how many accounts engaged with your content, and specific content you shared

Protip: Customize the date ranges so that you can compare and contrast with previous timeframes to determine how prior engagement looks next to your current engagement.

How to Get Unshadowbanned on Instagram

If you have checked your Insights and believe to have been shadowbanned, here are the steps you should take:

Disallow 3rd Party Apps

Instagram does not like when certain third-party apps are connected to it and used. This is especially true if they violate one of the platform’s policies, such as ones that reveal to you who has unfollowed you.

Warning: Besides shadowbans, your account may be restricted or suspended if you use certain apps, so be sure any you use do not violate IG policies.

To revoke app permissions, take the following steps:

1. From your profile page, tap on the hamburger menu
2. Under Your apps and media tap on Website permissions followed by tapping on Apps and websites
3. Remove access to any apps you may believe are the culprit

Remove Policy-violating Content

If you have taken the above steps or do not have any third-party apps connected to your IG account, the next step to take should be to remove all content that violates the platform’s Community Guidelines.

Some types of content that could be causing you issues are the following:

• Anything Instagram deems to be “hate speech”
• Anything considered “sensitive content”
• Spam content
• Nudity

Remove content that contains any of these and you should no longer be shadowbanned if it was the cause.

Remove Banned Hashtags From Content

There are certain hashtags that, if used on your content, could result in that content, or even your entire account, getting shadowbanned. The way to resolve this is to remove all of the banned hashtags within your content.

How do you know if a hashtag is banned on Instagram? All you need to do is search for a suspect hashtag in the app’s search bar. If you see the following message pop up, the hashtag is banned:

Recent posts for #hashtag are hidden because some posts may not follow Instagram’s Community Guidelines.

Immediately delete the banned hashtags from your content.

Protip: Make sure you are not stuffing too many hashtags in your posts (ideally, no more than nine), or hashtags that are “broken” due to misspellings.

Report the Issue to Instagram

If you did all of the above and you still find you are shadowbanned, your final option is to contact Instagram directly.

Take the following steps:

1. From your profile page, tap on the hamburger menu to get taken to your settings
2. Find and tap on the Help option under More info and support
3. Tap on Report a problem, followed by Report a problem without shaking
4. Submit a report to Instagram after explaining your issue and requesting a resolution to your sudden decreased engagement

How to Avoid Shadowbans in the Future

Now that you know how to get unshadowbanned on Instagram, you will probably want to understand how you can avoid getting shadowbanned in the future.

Make sure you keep the following guidelines in mind while using Instagram to avoid shadowbans:

1. Avoid going against the Community Guidelines that are designed to protect others from harmful or spammy content.
2. Don’t share content that could offend others, or content that is spamming the posts of other content with invaluable responses.
3. Be respectful in all of your engagements with both your audience and others on Instagram.
4. Avoid using suspicious third-party apps that offer to do something for you not allowed by Instagram’s policies, such as apps that allow you to see who unfollowed you.
5. Stop using banned hashtags that have content violating IG’s rules and guidelines, or test hashtags as mentioned earlier prior to adding them to your content.
6. Focus on creating content that can easily trend and has high engagement potential, while shying away from anything too controversial that can get reported.
7. Add disclaimers or trigger warnings when posting more sensitive content, making sure you minimize the possibility of your content getting reported.
8. Avoid spamming at all costs, such as publishing too many posts within a small time frame, to avoid both shadowbans and account deletion.

Follow these guidelines and you should never have an issue with your IG account getting shadowbanned again.

How to Check if You’re Shadowbanned

Are you shadowbanned? There is a way you can determine, with a high degree of accuracy, whether your Instagram account has been shadowbanned or not.

Here are the steps you can take to confirm whether you have succumbed to the ill-fated shadowban:

1. Find and select a hashtag that you have previous not used in your content
2. Make a new post within which you place that hashtag
3. After some time (usually a few minutes to a few hours) your post will have been picked up by the algorithm
4. Sign out of the account you used to make the post and sign into another one
5. Look up the hashtag you used in the post within the app’s search field

Identify whether the post is visible under that hashtag or the Explore page. If you see it, then it means you are not shadowbanned. However, if you cannot find the post, then you have probably been shadowbanned.

Conclusion

The good news about being shadowbanned is that it is not necessarily permanent. If you follow our guide on how to get unshadowbanned on Instagram, you should not only reverse the restrictions imposed on your account, but also know how to prevent getting shadowbanned in the future.