Watch for the Shadowban…
We’re back!!! And today we’re talking about shadowbanning…
If you don’t know what being shadowbanned is, well this is your topic on what it is, and how you can avoid it.
I detail my story of being shadowbanned and what it looks like. This is a nasty thing so you want to try and avoid it at ALL cost!
What You’ll Learn:
- What a shadowban is
- Why social media companies shadowban
- How you can avoid shadowbanning
- What to do if you’re shadowbanned
and much more!
Automatic Episode Transcript — Please excuse any errors, not reviewed for accuracy
Hey guys welcome to electronic dance money your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers
Yo, what’s up everyone, I’m finally back from being sick as shit. And I’m, I’m really happy that
that I got to get over that was a gnarly cold, it did not feel good towards the end there but back up and running clear mind player had the day I was going to record I like waited last minute. Because I just didn’t know how it was gonna feel. And the day I was gonna record I woke up feeling far worse than I ever did. I was like, There’s no way I can record an episode. It’s just I’m too messed up. But we made it through. And now we’re going to move on to the next episode. And you know, the last episode we had a replay of I think it was episode 24. So if most of you listen to that, and you don’t remember that episode prior to that episode 73 what we discussed in Episode 73 was all about social media reach, how can you increase your reach? How can you increase your engagement? And what are some strategies that you can start to follow to really help with growing whatever social media page it is that you want to grow. A lot of the focus was on Instagram, though, because I that’s, that’s where a majority of our audience really is that and Tik Tok. And that’s where a lot of other producers and record labels are. And so it’s usually best that we play within that same space. Now, that being said, there’s something that we should probably discuss, which is what we’re going to talk about today, that I think is actually very, very important that I never brought up. And maybe it should have been a part of the episode. But now we have a standalone topic, based off of, or I should say standalone episode based off of this topic. And that has to do with Shadow banning. And, like why that could be a threat to you, how you can avoid it and what it really is. So if you don’t know what shadow banning is, it’s this mysterious thing that everyone seems to know is going on by social media companies. Yet no social media company has ever admitted that they actually engage in shadow shadow banning. And so essentially, what shadow banning is, is technically on paper, your account is still active, it’s up, you can find it, if you search hard enough, you can post you can do every you can do all of your normal things. But what social media companies will do is they’ll make it very, very difficult for people to see your posts any new posts, they’ll make it very difficult for them to actually find you if if they end up searching you especially if you have a lot of followers with your specific name. If people search that name, they’ll pull up like five or six other accounts, that is not that are not associated with yours. Some of them may have similar name, some might not, they’re just gonna put you down the list. So essentially, they’re they’re banning you from reaching anyone without actually banning you. Because they they may not have a great reason. Now why do they do this? Who fucking knows? Whoever could be in charge at some level, some higher level could have a grudge, it could be an algorithm, it could be a number of things, there could be a decision maker that’s deciding who can and can’t be shadowbanned, though, I’d suspect what it really is, is it has to do with the algorithm, and the algorithm flagging your account based off of certain activities. Who knows what it could be. Now, why am I discussing this? Why do I know so much about it? It’s because I would argue that my account is currently in that shadow banning phase. So let’s get a little bit more into my story about why my Instagram account is set up this way. So sometime in I think it was 2018, late 2018, early 2019. I was making a lot of content. In fact, some of you who followed me before the podcast was released and then started listening to podcast probably found me through a lot of different content I was creating now I was creating a lot of like Tips and Tricks type of content teaching people how to how to write in certain ways produce mix, using infographics, essentially, on Instagram, and it was getting a ton of traffic, I was getting so much engagement, a lot of comments, a lot of follows a lot of saves a lot of shares. Just a ton of engaging content and, and you can actually go and look in my, my history of Instagram and go look those posts, you can see how many likes they get, you can see all the comments, you can see all of the engagement. And then one day, the engagement just stopped. Now, the reach I was getting on those posts to the insights was a lot. I mean, I was I was reaching hundreds of pages, if not 1000s, a high majority of those were coming from pages that don’t follow me people who don’t follow me. So I was reaching a huge audience that was not engaged with me or following me and I was and then they were starting to follow me. So I was almost every day, I was probably getting three to five followers. I don’t get that at all. Now, maybe I get one to two followers every couple of weeks, maybe if I’m lucky, depends on the content that I’m putting out the, if I’m engaging with others, but it all dropped my reach to those accounts not following me plummeted to maybe one to 2% of what the original reach was accounts that do follow me again, same thing I was getting maybe one to 2% of the Reach to account that followed me something happened in this is day and night, you can see it through my posts, you can see all of the engagement increasing, getting better and better. And then it just stops. All of a sudden, I’m getting a few likes per post. I’m not reaching anyone via hashtags, I’m not reaching accounts that follow me, I’m not reaching accounts that don’t follow me, I’m not getting saves. I’m not getting comments, I’m not getting anything. And this is overnight, this happens. And so that’s why I started to realize, Oh, something got flagged on my account in something is wrong. I don’t know what, but this just isn’t working. So I stopped creating a lot of this content, because it just wasn’t worth my time. I wasn’t gonna get the reach on Instagram, right? Something got flagged on my account where I’m no longer reaching people, no matter the hashtags I use, whether I use 20 hashtags or three hashtags, whether I use a hashtag that’s got millions of followers and posts, that’s not relevant to my content at all, or whether or not the all the hashtags are, like strictly relevant to exactly the content that I’m reading didn’t matter what I did. And I couldn’t post that. I mean, I could post that content on Facebook, but it’s also not going to reach anyone Facebook is paid to play. So something was wrong, I’m not going to keep wasting my time creating this content in so you can see my content strictly go from fairly diverse, from like helping people giving tips and tricks, creating engaging content mixed with blog posts mixed with the podcast, just a ton of different content. And so I stopped doing that and my content just go strictly to essentially the podcast, just posting the podcast. But I mean, even those posts weren’t really getting anywhere. Now, I never figured out what it was that caused the issue on my account. I tried reaching out to Instagram multiple times they don’t respond support does not respond. They don’t care. They don’t care about users at all. They only they only care about people who have massive amounts of followings. So for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the issue was. And recently I’ve been trying to figure out why is it that my account got flagged that I’m I suspect I’m being shadow banned, my my posts are being hidden. They’re not reaching my audience. I started testing new hashtags, new strategies of hashtags, tagging other people tagging my location, just nothing was working. And then I was doing some, some additional hashtag research and I actually went to the hashtag hashtag EDM. And I wanted to look through some posts on there. And the page came up blank on my phone.
Just a white screen. I kept trying to refresh it wouldn’t work. I tried using a different phone still didn’t work. So then I started doing some research and I Googled, why isn’t a thing coming up on hashtag EDM on Instagram. And that’s when I got a plethora of posts. Now these all date back to 2015. But the post was that all these different blog posts were stating that Instagram was banning the hashtag hashtag EDM because because it’s being used to filter, nude content. So people were using it as you know, hashtag electronic dance music to share music, and whatnot, it was being used for content that violates Instagrams terms of agreement. And I just found this out just like a few weeks ago. And that’s when I realized, oh my god, I was using hashtag EDM on so many of my posts of my previous posts. And now, now, if you, if you do look up on computer on Instagram, like hashtag EDM, it’ll show like the most recent nine posts or something using that hashtag, but it won’t show anything else. It’s really weird that the hashtags fucked up somehow, it you can’t like just keep scrolling through content, there’s, there’s a number of weird things going on with that hashtag that Instagram has done with their algorithm. Because they, they essentially want to ban this content back in 2015. They haven’t, they have not reverted back to be able to use the hash tag or something. And so this is when I came to the realization that I think I suspect, when it counts have issues, very similar to mine. And I’m not the only one other people have had this issue. I suspect, what has happened is they’ve used a banned hash tag on far too many posts. And for whatever reason, the way the algorithm is set up is it reads that and it detects it, and it’ll flag your account as either a spam account, or an inappropriate account. And they’ll just, they’ll cut off all of your reach to everyone. Because they want to minimize as much as what as much of whatever, quote unquote bad content that the algorithm suspects you have putting out, they want you to reach as few people as possible. So they’ll shadow ban you, they won’t outright ban you. Because I don’t I suspect that the the algorithm can’t detect. If you’re, if your account is actually posting bad content that violates our terms, they’d have to do a manual assessment of your account, look through it, and then they determine if they’re going to just straight up, delete your account and ban you. I know there are ways that I think the algorithm can detect if you’re using bots to follow people or get people to follow you and they can delete your account that way. But in terms of like using hashtags, I suspect the algorithm isn’t smart enough to see if whatever content you’re posting is inappropriate. Well, I should say, algorithms can detect new dean content, they can detect that they can ban those they can they can delete those posts. But I mean, I guess there’s a flaw or some sort of issue in their system, based off of the use of hashtags. So my whole point being that in Episode 73, when we were talking about social media reach, we talked about, you know, researching hashtags, we talked about going into hashtags, and starting to comment on posts. And in doing that with hashtags that you use, or be able to find new hashtags to use. When we talk about doing hashtag research, this needs to be a major part of the conversation so that you can avoid this issue that I’m in I’m I’m in an issue where i have i My account is still very young, but I can’t reach anyone I can’t grow. My growth is severely limited. I can’t reach people.
That’s, that’s kind of changing at the moment with this new Spotify playlist that I’ve got going on where I’m posting new updates to this playlist and tagging the artist tagging the record labels. So they’re following me and they’re sharing my content. So I’m hoping that this can kind of jumpstart my account, again, to start reaching new people in reaching accounts, and getting new followers and it’s I am getting more followers than I ever have since the last time I was actually reaching accounts. So hopefully this will trigger the algorithm to allow me to be in front of people again, otherwise, my only other option which this would more than likely be your option as well, if you’re in a situation is just deleting the account, and starting over, which sucks there’s a lot of content on my Instagram. And you know, maybe this is a good opportunity, opportunity for me to essentially repost all of that stuff, using correct hashtags and maybe getting far more reach than I ever would, especially with if I could, I could essentially post every single day for almost an entire year all my content and reach a lot of people do, maybe the algorithm would really like that. Who knows, I haven’t decided what I want to do. But you need to understand that shadow banning is a real thing. I’ve actually been affected by it. If anyone has any answers as to why it’s not sure. I should say, if anyone has a reason as to why this is not shadow me being shadow banned. And you have my answers. You know why my account was restricted like this, please reach out. I love to have you on the podcast where you talk more about this subject, and break down why I was wrong, and what the real issues are, because I would hate to feed you guys bad information. But this is my experience with Shadow banning and how it can actually affect you. And what I suspect is the issue, I think it’s a broken algorithm issue with old hashtags that they ban that don’t need to be banned anymore. Who knows? Maybe they do still need to be banned? I don’t know. As far as I know, everything talking about them banning this hashtag was from seven years ago. Sorry, I’d imagine that it could have been fixed by now. I don’t know. But it’s very frustrating. Because I, I mean, I can’t grow my account anymore. So be wary of this. When you’re doing hashtag research, look up if the hashtag has been banned. Do a thorough research, look on Instagram, if you’re if you see any of those similar triggers, that that would make us suspect that a hashtag is banned. So you know, if you search on your phone, you get a blank white screen, if you search it on desktop, it just shows you the top posts, the nine top posts, and that’s it, you can’t search through the hashtag. Those are all red flags that something’s wrong with the hashtag, you probably shouldn’t use it. So keep that stuff in mind. This is a quick episode want to chime in about this stuff. But I hope you guys can avoid the situation. The way I was not able to but you live you learn. Maybe Maybe it’s for the better if I just restart. But this is also actually before I leave this right here is a great fucking example of why you need an email list. Because imagine if every single one of my followers were on my email list, and I could just shoot them an email and say, Hey, I had to delete my account and restart. I’m needing new followers. Go follow me here, right this is this is why you want to collect emails, so that if you’re ever in a tight situation like this, and you need to restart, it’s not going to be as bad when you have all the emails of your followers and you can just shoot them one big email. So massive bump for email marketing, get on that collecting emails. Watch your hashtags. Avoid being shadow banned at all costs. And I hope this saves an account. But I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks.
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