Image: TAEX

You’re not Shadowbanned

The price of being politically active on your Instagram

If you, like me, have noticed a significant gap (read: chasm) between the amount of people who follow you on Instagram and the amount of people who view your stories, I went down the rabbit hole of Instagram policies so you don’t have to.
I have spent the better half of the past year devoting my social media channels to criticise and, perhaps aspirationally, hold the US accountable for its growingly monstrous foreign policy. I had always been mindful of my platform, but my Instagram was overwhelmingly devoted to showcasing works of art. Nowadays, I barely post any new works, and there were times when I wondered if I would eventually pay some sort of price for this flip, but the toll I imagined was not algorithmic—it was social. After all, it would be understandable for people following an account for its artistic content to simply get tired of constant political criticism. Having said that, it was certainly tempting to think of this leading to me getting shadowbanned, since it would reaffirm my already dim view of Meta and its ilk.
Sure enough, a year or so later, the numbers lately simply don’t add up. There are days when 75 or 84 people see my stories, which account for less than 1% of my followers. Mathematically, this doesn't make sense. The truth behind this… is a bit complicated.
In 2024, Instagram, by default, <a href="https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-our-approach-to-political-content-on-instagram-and-threads">limited political content you can get exposed to from accounts you do not follow</a>. This has since become a setting you could manually switch, like an on/off switch, but only if you know where to look for it. And while Meta has since relaxed the mechanism since then, that the default setting for at least 2024-2025 was to insulate you from political content is alarming, since it all but ensured you were only exposed to content that reaffirmed your worldview, reinforcing only your perspectives and philosophies, while making it harder for you to entertain alternative viewpoints.
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The default setting for at least 2024-2025 was to insulate you from political content is alarming, since it all but ensured you were only exposed to content that reaffirmed your worldview.
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What this meant in terms of artist Instagram accounts is more complicated. After all, if you made art that in any way comments or protests a political topic, or if you made work that the algorithm may perceive as inherently political, such as identity-based work around gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, etc., then you were also at risk of not being recommended to people. If you made work documenting or depicting any sort of ongoing conflict, your work was likely not recommended by the algorithm to people who had this setting off for an entire year, perhaps longer.
But none of these filters apply to stories. When it comes to sharing stories, and I naively used these over posts on main to share my political commentary, the algorithm works differently. The most insidious dimension to the way Meta decides what you see, is through ranking and predicted interest.
The simplest way to explain this process is, if you find yourself browsing/brain-rotting on the feed, scrolling through videos, how fast you scroll past a video constantly tweaks Meta’s idea of who you are and what you like. This also applies to watching people’s stories. And if someone posts a bunch of stories about children dying in the West Bank that you scrolled past, then Meta begins to show you less of that content. If the person who posted those stories usually shares political content, this means that you see less of them in general. <a href="https://transparency.meta.com/features/explaining-ranking/ig-stories/">This is called downranking.</a>
Political exhaustion, and crisis fatigue, are very real. But throttling the visibility of artists, whom we often rely on to speak the truth in times when other people won’t, is quite the insidious kind of censorship, if only because it is less about the content being censored and more about Meta making a choice to keep you on the app without making you feel uncomfortable about the realities of the world.
At a time when we now have<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c747x7gz249o"> legal proof as well as scientific evidence</a> that these companies want us to be addicted to their products, it is imperative that we hold them accountable while also remaining vigilant about all the artists whose content we may have stopped seeing over the last year. Thankfully, the fix is as easy as deliberately searching their account and manually checking on their stories for a day or two. Add a few likes or comments, and they are back on your radar.
Something to keep in mind if some of the artists you know you follow have been missing from your feed recently.

TAEX is an interdisciplinary platform for artists, curators, and collectors to discuss, showcase, and sell crypto art.

You’re not Shadowbanned

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