Instagram Users Were Shocked By Shadownban, What Was That?

Illustrations (Image Credit: Cedrik Wesche / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - In the last few days, Instagram has been enlivened by the Shadowban event, where users who are affected will experience a decrease in engagement, lose followers, likes, and even the number of viewers on Instagram Stories.

One of them is the Instagram account @dagelan. In the upload, the @dagelan account claims to have lost its followers. Although it was not specifically stated how many followers were lost.

He also asked his followers to press the "like (like)," "comment," "save / bookmark" and "share" buttons to restore his engagement back. The @dagelan account suspects the cause is Shadowban.

Reporting from the Later page, Thursday, December 10, the term Shadowban appeared since 2006, which is interpreted as limiting the distribution of uploads. Where the platform owner "deliberately" made user uploaded content not easy for everyone to find, without the uploader's knowledge.

In the case of Instagram, uploads from influencers or content creators are hidden so that they don't appear widely in the feeds or stories of some other users.

For example, when a user uploads a photo using a certain hashtag and is then searched for by accounts that don't follow him. So, accounts that are not yet a follower will not find uploads from the uploader, even though the account is public.

And only the followers it has right now can see the uploads from that user, so the upload exposure will not be that wide.

This Shadowban phenomenon has not only hit Instagram users. Reportedly, several Twitter users also experienced it.

According to The Art News Paper, Instagram has never officially acknowledged this tactic and, in an Instagram Live broadcast last February, Instagram's Chief, Adam Mosseri, even completely denied Shadowban.

But in a statement released in 2017, Instagram acknowledged that users experienced, "an issue with our hashtag search that is causing posts not to appear and the company will continue to make improvements."