What is a shadowban?

The feeling is familiar: views drop from thousands to a few hundred, posts stop showing up on the For You page or Explore, and nothing says why. “Shadowbanned” is the word people reach for. It describes a real thing and a lot of things that aren't that thing.

The real thing is a limit on recommendations. The post stays up and your followers can still see it, but the app stops showing it to people who don't follow you, which for most short videos is where the views come from. Every big app does this for some content, under its own name: ineligible for the For You feed on TikTok, not eligible for recommendations on Instagram, demoted or given less distribution on YouTube.

The rest is ordinary. Instagram's head wrote in 2021 that people “often accuse us of ‘shadowbanning’” and that it's “a broad term that people use to describe many different experiences,” adding that most followers won't see what you share because most look at less than half of their feed. TikTok says that if a video isn't getting many views, it “doesn't necessarily mean it broke a rule.” On YouTube Shorts, a Short that doesn't hold viewers as well as the others in the feed won't go much beyond its first few hundred or thousand views. Plenty of clips that stall weren't restricted at all: people swiped past them in the first seconds.

Here's what each app says it limits, and where it tells you, from its own pages:

Two patterns run through all three. A limit on recommendations isn't a removal: TikTok notes that people can still find a video through search or your profile. And the most common trigger for clip accounts is the same everywhere: posting other people's videos with nothing of your own added. What each app counts as unoriginal is in TikTok's unoriginal content rules, YouTube's reused content policy and Meta's originality rules for Facebook and Instagram.

1. Look where the app tells you. On TikTok, a video's analytics and your notifications; on Instagram, Account Status. If neither shows a limit, you probably don't have one.
2. Read your first seconds. A clip people swipe past gets few views with no restriction at all: check swipe-away rate on Shorts and retention on TikTok.
3. If something was flagged, act on it. Delete it or appeal: TikTok and Instagram both let you appeal.
4. Stop what triggers it. No reposts of other accounts' clips, no one else's watermark, nothing posted twice. On Instagram, an aggregator account is recommended again once most of what it posts over 30 days is original.
5. Don't try to trick the system. TikTok removes fake likes and followers and bans automation tools meant to get around its systems, and YouTube's spam policy names speeding up audio, heavy filters and cropping to dodge detection.