The Hidden Truth Behind Instagram’s AI Technology
By
Andrew Krynin and Daria Dmytrenko
Instagram’s AI engine is now rapidly able to spot and shadow ban Instagram users who violate the company’s terms, which means any Instagram user who has ever paid for traffic or used a third-party Instagram service that required your login credentials is at a high risk of being shadow banned at some point in 2020. Our research shows an 80% likelihood of a shadow ban for such Instagram users within the next 6 months or less. It does not matter whether the user believed they were purchasing real traffic or not.
About Shadow Banning
Shadow banning occurs when a user vanishes from Instagram despite having a public account. This means that the user is still visible to their current friends but has otherwise disappeared from Instagram entirely.
Generally speaking, there was not a single official confirmation from Facebook on the existence of shadow ban or how it works. Presented below is private research performed by the IGnation team, who for ethical reasons we will not share the names of services used during their research.
Everything You Need to Know to Avoid a Shadow Ban
A shadow ban occurs for 4 reasons:
- You use broken hashtags
- Your account is often reported
- You’ve been posting, commenting, engaging, or following people too quickly (or for example commented: “Nice” under last 50 posts
- You use bots or another automated “Instagram growth” tool/service
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/instagram-shadowban
The first three are self-explanatory: don’t use inflammatory hashtags such as #ISIS, don’t harass other users and don’t spam other users. Number 4 is where things get dicey.
Number 4 consists of 3 parts:
1. Don’t use bots
Let’s first clarify what the best instagram bot actually is. Bots are simply fake accounts, and there are high- and low-quality options.
The traits of a high-quality bot are how human it looks and feels to the Instagram algorithm. Longer living accounts with more natural behavior sell on the market for higher than new accounts and those with less realistic behavior.
However, our developers found that all bots are now treated as equal. When we played with different quality bots, the results were the same: both resulted in a shadow ban. While it statistically mattered how many bots subscribed to an account and the source of where they were coming from, an account got shadow banned and the followers were removed in all instances. For low quality bots, 5 out of 10 accounts got shadow banned in the first week, 7 out of 10 in a first month and 10 out of 10 in 6 months. For high quality bots it was 3 out of 10 in a first month, 6 out of 10 in 3 months and 8 out of 10 in 6 months (yes 2 got out alive).
The lesson being, all bots are bad in 2020.
2. Don’t use automated “Instagram growth” tools/services
This was the most interesting part of our research. There is very limited information online about how Instagram finds out you are using the growth service, so we had to figure it out ourselves.
It turns out, you tell Instagram whenever you give your login credentials to an outside service. It sees the unusual IP address, which is not a problem when it’s a one-time case. However, because these growth services are accessing many accounts from the same IP address, the Instagram algorithm can see this.
Now, here is the beauty of Instagram’s creativity. Instead of outright banning the growth service, Instagram shadow bans all people whose accounts have been accessed from that IP. This nullifies all results from the service and punishes the users who broke the rules – beautiful.
3. Never give away your password
But it doesn’t end there. Instagram is not only limiting growth tools and services, but rather ALL unauthorized 3rd party tools. You can even get shadow banned for harmless apps like auto-posting and chatbots. Anything which asks for login credentials and is not approved by Instagram could get you in trouble.
Therefore, IGnation does not require your Instagram password, as we utilize public data so our users can organically grow their accounts without the risk of a shadow ban and without compromising their login credentials.
