Is my Instagram profile shadowbanned?

Published by Tim on Wednesday June 25, 2025

Last modified on July 15th, 2025 at 15:47

I am asking myself: Is my Instagram channel possibly shadowbanned? Since I speak out more clearly against the cheeky, shady behaviour of social media companies, since I ask people to follow me on Mastodon and since I’ve partnered with institutions that fight for a free internet – the reach and the growth of my channel seems to stagnade.

Without having any proofs, I am asking myself if there is a corellation with the interests of the platform providers.

So what is shadowbanning? Wikipedia:

“Shadow banning is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user’s content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.”

So what does shadowbanning really do? Well, if you are getting a lot of positive feedback on social media, you kind of get addicted to the dopamine hits that comments, mentions, likes and followers trigger in your brain. And if you feel like it’s getting less, social anxiety arises. It cause stress, which can possibly lead to a change of behaviour and adaption to what actually “works” on social media. That may be a reason why so many people do not speak out openly against these practices, what again leads to the impression there is no real problem.

Our feeds are curated by algorithms, as we all know. So do these algorithms boost critical messages on AI and social media? I really doubt that and I gess the opposite is the case.

That’s not just annoying. It’s a psychological trick: fewer likes = more anxiety = more compliance. That’s how platforms shape discourse without ever saying a word.