How to Tell If You Are Affected by the Instagram Shadow Ban

The topic of Instagram shadow banning users has been a hot topic for the last couple weeks. Some people think it’s a real thing while others don't. The problem is that there was no way to actually prove its existence or to even see if you were affected — until now.

The general idea behind the shadow ban is that everything you do and see within Intagram looks normal. When you click a hashtag that you have recently used, you can clearly see your image as you would expect. But if you are shadow banned, when a user that does not follow scrolls through the same hashtag feed, they won't see your image at all. What this means is that you will not be able to develop any new followers through the discovery process using hashtags.

Using this new shadow ban analyzer site, you can enter the link to a specific image on your feed and see if it’s shadow banned. The way it works is that it simply searches the list of hashtags you have for the image and sees if your picture shows up in the feed. While this seems to be convincing proof that the shadow ban is real, some people still believe that it’s simply an error with hashtags caused by all the algorithm changes being done by Instagram. Either way though, something is definitely wrong with the hashtag system.