Shadow Ban - A Short Story

3 days ago a friend of mine started his first instagram account. It’s just for fun. He is into photography and wants to share his pictures with the world. He uses 100% original content and he doesnt use jarvee or any other automation tool. He is posting everyday and i can see how he gets hooked and likes getting likes. He uses different Hashtags every post and is trying to figure out what works for him. Today he called me and was really disappointed he told me he posted but for any reason his posts dont show up in the Hashtags. So i checked it and indeed he had posted about 15 minutes ago and did not show up on any hashtag. So we checked his hashtags. He used about 20. I knew about banned hashtags (#kansas) so we checked all hashtags (scrolling to the bottom of the hashtag page). None of them was marked as banned. But he also used #lovesunset #lovesunshine
#fotografausleidenschaft (passionated photographer). We came to the conclusion that these three could be associated with sex so we deleted them. We checked the hashtag pages again and his post was shown on every single hashtagpage.

tldr: take care which hashtags you use even if they are not marked as banned they could be.

Actually count the hashtags. Using more than 29 I believe can lead to a shadowban. Might have been debunked, but I never go over that amount. You removed 3 hashtags, meaning if he had 30, you now have 27 and the post showed up. I think it’s far more likely that you used too many hashtags, rather than those random 3 are banned lol.

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As i wrote he used about 20. After deleting 3 about 17

my understanding is that brand new accounts won’t show under hashtags for a week or two, so this is expected behavior. It’s possible that it just took a few days to show.