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How do you fix a shadow ban? That is the exact question that I'm going to be answering in today's episode. And let me start by saying I believe that 99% of people will never be shadowbanned in their entire life on Instagram. But 100% of people feel like they've been shadowbanned at one point or another. In fact, according to a recent poll in my own personal broadcast channel on Instagram, 70% of respondents said that they feel like they've been shadowbanned at one point or another. So in today's episode, I'm going to do four things in the following order. First, I'm going to help you understand what exactly the shadow ban actually is. Second, I'm going to help you understand why it feels so flipping common. Third, I'm going to show you a way that you can actually check to see if your account has been shadowbanned, which not many people talk about. And fourth, I'm going to break down how you can overcome the shadow ban and break out of jail. But first, like I said, let's start with the dictionary definition of shadow ban so that we're all on the same page. A shadow ban is when a social media platform secretly limits a user's content visibility, making it seem like they're posting normally, but others can't see their posts in feeds or searches. And the key word in this definition is secret. I think a huge reason why people feel like they've been shadowbanned is because the algorithm feels like a secret. For most people, the algorithm is very confusing. It's overwhelming. It's kind of this obscure thing that they don't really understand. They kind of hear everyone talking about it, but it doesn't really make sense. And. And so it feels kind of like a secret. And thus their account not getting very many views or not getting as many views as they feel that it should is also a secret. But that's where I come in. Hello, my name is Brock, and it's my job to help you understand the algorithm in simple terms, to give you the no BS facts about how to actually grow on Instagram. And while I'm constantly giving you algorithm updates and best practices, if I'm just simplify the algorithm into one sentence, it's this. If you make good content that gets people to watch, like, and even share, your posts will get more views, period. I would argue that right now the algorithm is simpler than it's ever been before. Instagram and many other platforms are continuing to make their algorithms more and more Refined where it used to require a lot of different inputs and all these different data points to figure out if your post was a good post. Now, after decades of collecting data, these algorithms are really, really skilled at figuring out what posts are worthy of blowing up and what posts probably aren't. Now, of course, there are exceptions. There are mistakes made by the algorithm. It is not perfect, but it's a lot better today than it was five or 10 years ago. You used to be able to trick the algorithm and do these little hacks. And while there are some social media coaches who still teach that if you stand on your left leg and you say a magic word and then you spin around three times, you'll go viral, that's just not the case anymore. It definitely used to be true that there were, like, little things that you could do with your hashtags or little settings that you could enable, but now it's just not really going to make a difference. And so I would also argue that the algorithm is more fair than it has ever been. Followers matter less and good content matters more. According to the head of Instagram himself, follower counts matter less than view and like counts. So while someone like myself who has a bunch of followers on Instagram might feel like that's not fair because I worked so hard to get all these followers, it's actually a more level playing field across the board. Instagram no longer cares that, oh, Brock has 800k followers. He must make really good content. No, instead, Instagram looks at each post from me and each post from every single one of you with a blank slate and asks the question, is this a good post? And it determines the answer to that question based off, how long are people watching it for? Are people liking it? And then the creme de la creme are people sharing it. But I would also say that it's actually because of this fairness that shadow banning feels more common than ever before. Basically, a fair to everyone algorithm feels unfair or feels like a disadvantage to people who already have a big following or people who have been on Instagram for a long time. It used to be like, well, Yeah, I have 300 followers, so I'm not getting very many views. Or I have 300,000 followers, so, yeah, I'm going to get a lot of views. But now, again, since the algorithm is more balanced and more fair, if you have 300 followers, you can get 300,000 views. You can go viral much easier than you could have in the past. And at the same time, if you have 300,000 followers, you have to work just as hard as that person with 300 followers to go viral and to get views. It's kind of like how inclusivity programs can feel like a disadvantage to people who have been in power for hundreds of years. But I digress. People like me with a large following are not actually being disadvantaged. It just feels like a disadvantage because we're no longer getting the advantage that we used to get if we think of our posts like running in a race. My post, as someone with a large following, used to get a head start, but now we're all starting at the same starting line. An analogy that I've said before that I feel is very helpful is that a level playing field is, is also a more crowded playing field, so it is more competitive than ever before to get views. And then you throw on top of that, probably the biggest and most important fact of all, which is simple supply, demand, economics. Supply, which in our case is the number of posts being posted on a daily basis is at an all time high. There are more content creators than ever before. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new content creators who are starting every single month. And people on average are posting more. At least content creators and small business owners are posting more in 2026 than ever before in human history. So there's just more volume, more competition, more posts being posted. But there aren't necessarily that many more views, even though Instagram is adding tens of millions of new users every single month. And even though they are over 3.5 billion monthly active users now, the amount of time that we're spending on our phones hasn't really gone up. In fact, since 2020, daily phone usage and social media consumption has been either on a plateau or even a slight decline. That's the demand side of the equation. And so if you have supply that is higher than ever before, and demand that is either plateaued or decreasing, of course we're all going to be getting less views. So I'm not here to gaslight you, and I'm not here to tell you that it doesn't suck to get low views. I'm just trying to help you understand why that might be the case and why it feels so much like a shadow ban when I would say that for most of us, it isn't actually a true shadow ban. The keyword in the definition for shadow ban is secret. Also, because Instagram actually doesn't make it a secret. They actually created a way where you can check to see if you are truly being shadow banned, which kind of takes the secretiveness the shadow out of it. Basically, there's a way to check if you are banned on Instagram. And when I say banned, I don't mean like banned from logging into your account completely locked out. I just mean banned from certain features, banned from certain perks, or maybe even just restricted from some of the normal ways you would expect your account to operate. Basically, you can go to your Instagram settings, scroll down and tap on the button that says Account Status and make sure that you're in good standing. If you see green check marks next to all of these, then good job. Instagram is not throttling your reach or shadow banning you. Additionally, if you see any red X's or anything other than a green check, you can actually tap on it and learn about what happened. Did you have a comment that was taken down? Did you have a post that had to be removed? Did you take some kind of action that is against Instagram's community guidelines? But again, the algorithm is a computer, so it makes mistakes. Sometimes it'll remove a comment that says it was a hate comment and it was just you saying something nice to your friend. Sometimes it will remove a post because it misdiagnoses what was in the post. If it was truly a mistake, which definitely happens from time to time, there is an appeal process and you can actually go through that appeal process right there in the account status settings. If it wasn't a mistake, and yeah, you accidentally did post a picture of your butt or yeah, you were really angry and you left a nasty comment on someone's page and you have an account violation. Don't worry, all hope is not lost. Usually these strikes or restrictions do resolve themselves. Typically, the first restriction that ever happens on your account usually only lasts for about three hours and then it resets. The second one lasts for seven hours and the third one lasts for an entire day. If you pass that third strike, then the restrictions start getting longer. So if you pass the 24 hour mark, your fourth strike will usually last about three days. Your fifth strike will last an entire week. And your final strike can last anywhere from three weeks to a month or even longer. And for most of us, these violations, these strikes, are not things that we're going to have to worry about. They're not things that we're ever really going to be in jeopardy of violating. If you do want to read Instagram's terms and services, you can read them by looking them up. I'll put them in the show notes below as well, but they spell everything out. And if you break one of Instagram's guidelines, especially if you break it knowingly, like it wasn't a mistake that the algorithm made, well, then Instagram has every right to ban you. That's not a shadow ban. If they tell you what the rules are and you break the rules, you can't get mad at Instagram for enforcing those rules. Now, with all that being said, there are definitely some topics that are kind of in a gray area and some topics that Instagram has admitted in the past to reducing the reach of, even though it wasn't in their terms and service. So let's talk about those things. Early in 2024, Adam Lazzari announced that political content was no longer going to be eligible for non follower reach. To put that in layman's terms, basically, if you posted something that was deemed political, and we never really got a clear definition for what that meant because some people believe that all things are political, some people believe that it was only if you talked about like the presidency in the United States. Basically, if you posted something that the Instagram algorithm deemed political, that content would not be shown to anyone who didn't already follow you. So your existing followers could see it, but it wasn't going to be shown to anyone new, and it wouldn't be able to be a post that could grow your following. A few months later, they added a setting that allowed you to control how much political content you saw. You could choose if you wanted, all of it, none of it, or some of it. And then eventually, because of so much pushback, about a year later in 2025, they announced that they were getting rid of this restriction and political content would be eligible for non follower reach again. But what this example does show us is that Instagram is willing and they literally have throttled the reach of certain topics, even if those topics are cleared good and allowed by the terms of service. Quick sidebar about political content before I share, a few of these other gray areas that I wouldn't recommend posting too much about is that oftentimes I hear from people I posted about X Political Thing X and it performed horribly and Instagram is shadow banning me because of it. And I don't believe that's the case. And I say that because I've heard from people on every end of the spectrum that Instagram is throttling their reach. I've heard people who are all the way to the right and all the way to the left both complain about the same thing. And so Instagram is not throttling either of your reach. What is more likely happening is that that's not why people follow you. People follow you because you have great baking recipes. People follow you because you have good financial advice. And, and then you decided to post about something political. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. What I'm saying is you posted about something that is divisive and people were divided. And a lot of people, when they saw your post, they disagreed. And so they probably kept scrolling. Maybe they pressed, not interested, maybe they unfollowed you. And all of these are negative forms of engagement in the algorithm. And so when people do that, the algorithm is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not a good post. People are not watching it for a long time. They're not liking and they're not sharing. And so the algorithm decides to show that post to less people. It's not because Instagram as a platform has decided that they are anti left or anti right. It's simply that your followers have decided I didn't follow you for political content. And according to a recent report put out by manychat, the number one reason that people unfollow other people on Instagram is because those people are posting political content. So if you're a political content creator, of course, post your political content. But for most of us, most of the time, unless it's something that's important, unless something that you feel is necessary to speak on, and by the way, I've done an entire episode in the past on this topic about when you should decide to speak up and et cetera, et cetera. Basically, if you post about political content and you post your opinion online, don't be surprised if it doesn't perform well. Finally, the last thing I will say before I talk to you about how you can break out of the shadow ban and break out of the 200 View jail, as some people call it, is some of these gray areas that I would just generally recommend avoiding. These include THC or marijuana. These include alcohol, guns, adult content creators. Even if you're posting something that's not completely nude, if you're semi nude, if you're in a super small bikini or a super small Speedo, Instagram will usually show those posts to less people. And then finally, if you're in the make money online niche, where you are a business coach who coaches other business coaches to become business coaches themselves, and Instagram does crack down on that niche because there are a lot of people who are trying to steal money from others and run ponzi schemes. And so these niches in general are just something that I would recommend staying away from. Or if you are in one of these niches, then you're going to have to get creative with your content. I've seen some people will say S3X to spell out that word instead of spelling out the entire word. Also, you'll often hear people using words that rhyme with the word that might be criminal activity or illegal. But with all that being said, how do you actually break out of the 200 View jail? How do you overcome the shadow ban and get some more views back to your Instagram account? Number one, we need to reengage our existing followers. Now next week I'm going to be putting out an episode on how do you revive a dead account. So definitely, if that's something where you're like, hey, I've got some followers, but I just get no engagement, check out that episode next week. It'll be super helpful for you. Now, when I say we're going to make a post that's going to re engage our existing followers, I need to make sure we're clear. It's not going to be a reel. On average, carousels actually get more engagement than reels and they get significantly more views from your followers than reels per a metrical study from 2025. So we're going to post a carousel, not a reel. The second thing we're going to do is in that carousel, we're going to break the norm. This is not going to be a YouTube thumbnail style carousel. Instead, I want this carousel to be creative, original. It might be mixed media where it's fun photos and videos. It might be memes. It might be a super authentic and genuine and vulnerable story that you've never told before. Basically, this content should not sound nor should it look like anything else that you have ever posted on your Instagram. Now if you want help coming up with one of these creative carousel ideas, I've done multiple episodes now, two different episodes with eight different creative carousel ideas in each of those episodes. So go check that out. And then the third thing that you're going to do in this post to re engage your existing followers is you're not going to educate. Way too many people on Instagram have overdone it with the value and the education and the quick tips and the lesson learned. And let's be real here, your local library is filled with some really, really valuable textbooks that have some great education in them, but they're sitting there collecting dust and they haven't been checked out in years because they're boring, they're not entertaining, they don't tell a story, they're not vulnerable, they're not authentic, they don't have a strong hook, they don't have a strong line or narrative. They're just kind of some education. And so my tip for you is in this carousel where you're breaking the norm, entertain, don't educate. And you can do that by doing all the things that I just listed as someone who cooks about 95% of their meals at home. And no, that's not an exaggeration. Usually the only meal that Tay and I eat out each week is our Sushi Saturday. What we eat, what we prepare, it matters a lot to us. And that's why I'm so excited to introduce you to our newest sponsor, HelloFresh. 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It's basically everything you could need to create seamless, multi channel campaigns that hit the mark every single time. Get started for free today or use code TRIBE50 to get 50% off the starter and standard plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and aura. Focus on storytelling, focus on the visuals, focus on the hook, and less on the value that you're providing. Now, just as important as the things that you should do, there are probably some things that you're thinking, oh, maybe I could try this that I'm going to tell you not to do. And the first thing that I'm going to tell you not to do is don't buy followers, don't buy likes, don't buy engagement. If this is something that you've done in the past, that might be a huge part of the reason that you now feel shadow banned. Because Instagram is like, hey, this person got all these followers in the past, but now they're not engaging. Well, yeah, they're not engaging because they're fake followers that you purchased. Well, hey, this person used to get so many likes, but now they're not getting very many likes. Well yeah, because you used to buy 1000 likes per post. Please do not for the love of God, ever purchase followers, likes, engagement or anything like that. Tip number two to break out of the shadow ban is to focus on share worthy content. Like I've said a few times, the algorithm cares about watch rate likes and the best of all is shares. And let's think about it, when someone shares a post with someone else and it brings that other person back to the platform, it improves that person's experience on the platform. They're now connecting with someone. They feel like, hey, I'm interacting with my friends. I love Instagram. It's such a social platform. It's a great place for me and my bestie, or me and my wife, or me and my boyfriend, whatever, to connect. And so Instagram rewards shares significantly more than anything else. In fact, according to an Insta ClubHub study, from 2026, one Instagram share usually equates to 400 additional views. That means if you get just three shares, your post will get a thousand extra views. And not only is it more quantity of viewers, it's higher quality of viewers as well, because it's not the algorithm guessing, it's not a post going viral and just reaching a bunch of people. It's one person sending it to someone else who they think would be interested. Someone who they think, oh yeah, we've talked about that before. Oh yeah, she'll relate to this. Oh yeah, he'll think that this is super funny because it will remind him of that one time we did that one thing. And so a share is a better viewer, someone who's more likely to become an engager, a follower, and a customer. Now I've done another entire episode about share worthy content. But to break it down real simply for you, I have an acronym and the acronym is share. S H A R E. And the S stands for simple. The more simple your posts are, the more simple the words in your post are, the more easy it is to understand your posts, the more likely people are to watch, engage and follow. There's this classic idea in marketing called the drunk grandma. And it's basically that your posts need to be so simple they could be understood by drunk grandma. I also say that they need to be so simple that they could be understood by a fifth grader. And if you've ever watched that show are you smarter than a fifth grader? You'll know that most people are not smarter than a fifth grader. It's not necessarily that like all of your followers are dumb or that you're trying to attract a low IQ follower. It's simply that people are seeing thousands upon thousands of posts every day and they're not seeing like every single one of yours. They're not even like in the mindset of like, who you are. It's not like they're scrolling through your page before they see your new post. They just watched a post about rock climbing and then they watched a post about F1 and then they watched a post about snowboarding and then your cake baking video popped up in their feed. So they're kind of having to quickly orient themselves and understand what this post is about and then decide whether or not they want to keep watching. And so if your post uses fancy lingo and acronyms and it's confusing and you use an analogy that doesn't really make sense, people are going to get bored or confused and they're going to scroll away. So simplify your posts. H stands for hook. Your hook is where you should focus most of your time, energy and attention, 80% of the resources, the time you spend crafting, the brainstorming, the AI, whatever you end up using for your posts should be focused on the first few seconds, the first sentence, or at least the first few first frames of your video at the beginning of your post. Your hooks need to be as simple as possible. They need to be as concise, which means as short as possible. And if possible, use a negative word in your hook like don't stop, avoid, cancel, stay away from unpopular. Things like that are more likely to grab our attention than their positive counterparts. The A stands for authentic and my pro tip for you to be more authentic is to just be you. No, I'm just kidding. My pro tip for you to be authentic is to reduce the time between idea and execution. The less filming, editing, script writing, refining, massaging, AI ing that you can do to your posts, the more authentic they will be. If you can say, hey, I have this idea of this story I want to tell and you can record it on your phone FaceTime style, just whip out your phone and start recording and then post it. That will be as authentic as possible. R stands for relatable and relatability comes from specificity. What I mean by that is the more specific that you can get in your examples, the more specific that you can get in the text that you're putting in your hook. The more specific you can get in the circumstance that you are labeling your meme with, the more people will relate to it and thus share it. For example, if I'm to post a picture of someone crying like a the crying Michael Jordan meme and I say me when my post flops, that's kind of funny, it's kind of relatable and I'm sure some people will share it. But if I take that exact same meme and I add a more specific piece of text that instead and says me when I spend three hours editing my reel and it gets seven likes that will be way more share worthy. It's way more specific, it feels more authentic and it is more relatable. The final letter in this acronym again is E and E is something that we have already talked about which is you should be focused on entertainment first and education second. Most people are so overly focused on the value which turns into so overly focused on the educational tips and that they forget that if your post isn't entertaining in the first place, ain't nobody going to learn or watch your educational tips. So focus on entertainment first. The second thing that I would recommend avoiding if you're stuck in the 200 view jail is 7 second reels. 7 second reels in general are fine. If your reel ends up being seven seconds, that's fine. But what I'm talking about here are the reels that are like super short. They have some sensationalized, overly dramatic, overdone, clickbait style hook up at the top and then you're like, what is it like you're waiting for whatever the tip is. You're waiting for the story and then it's like, read the caption. Instagram is a visual platform, so why are you making your followers read this little tiny size 3 font that is the most basic, like just white font on a black background or vice versa. And it's not engaging. And you're like forcing yourself to write this multi paragraph essay that's so boring in the caption. Posts are like farts. If you have to force them, they're usually so. Can your reels be seven seconds long? Sure. Can you write a long caption? Sure. But if you're forcing yourself to make a super short reel just to force people to then read the caption because you're like, oh, well, then they're going to watch the reel for more. You're not actually getting more viewers. You're just getting one person who's forced to read a long caption and it's counting their view three or four times because they played it over and over again. You're not actually getting that many more viewers. And in the long run that's going to lead to diminishing returns. Instead, tip number three to actually break out of the Shadow man is to start some sort of series or challenge, especially one that incentivizes an engagement or a follow. This is something that I've talked about quite a lot in 2026, and I am begging you to please start one. The challenge that I'm doing on my Instagram is reviewing one of my followers reels every single day until I reach 1 million followers. And then I tell people if they want to enter in to have their reel reviewed, all they have to do is like, my reel. Now I've incentivized the like, so people are going to be liking the reel in the hopes that I review theirs the next day. And there's kind of an implied call to action to follow as well because I say I'm reviewing the reels of my followers, so if you're not following me, you're not going to get a review. This has spiked my engagement. Every single time I post one of those posts, which is now a daily challenge, I get great engagement and great views and great interaction. And it's something that I don't have to think very hard about. I don't have to reinvent the wheel. I don't have to come up with a new idea. I know that every single day I'm going to have at least one reel posted because I'm just going to stick with my daily challenge. When you're coming up with your daily challenge, you want to, number one, make sure that it relates to your niche in some way. So if you're a running coach, running one step for every follower that you gained is awesome. If you are someone who does cake baking recipes, then running one step for every follower gained doesn't really make sense. Number two is you want the challenge to actually be challenging. You don't want it to just be like 30 days of eating keto. Like, yeah, that's challenging and I get it. It's probably not easy for everyone. But that's not something worth watching. That's not something worth coming back to. If it was like an entire day of keto eating under $10 or under $1. Now it's challenging. Now it's interesting. There's kind of that limitation on it. But if it's just a month of clean eating, why would I watch? It's not that cool. It's not that engaging. And I'm not saying you need to be crazy. I'm not saying that you need to be like outlandish. I'm not saying that you need to run a mile for every follower that you gain. But the more challenging you can make your challenge, the more likely people are to actually watch the next thing that you should absolutely not do. If you feel like you are shadow banned. And this one is taught by some social media experts. And it makes me so angry when I see people talking about this. It's removing followers. Whether it's removing people who you think are inactive followers, people who you think might not be ideal followers, removing people who are bots or spam. I don't care what the reason is, you should not be removing followers in bulk. It does not help. There have been many studies done and a lot of anecdotal evidence that has shown that when you remove massive amounts of followers, your future posts perform worse. The thought is like, well, if I have 100 followers and 30 of them are spammers and I remove those 30 spammers, now I only have 70 followers and so my engagement rate is going to go up. If I only have 70 people and I'm getting the same amount of likes, that's a higher engagement rate than before. And while mathematically that is true, what actually happens is the algorithm stops and is like, whoa, this person just lost 30% of their followers. This person just lost 50 followers. This person just lost 1,000 followers. Whether you blocked them, you removed them, they unfollowed. The algorithm doesn't care. The algorithm just sees that your following went. And so they show your future posts to less people. Because again, from the algorithm's perspective, these aren't spammers or robots or non ideal followers. These are just people who are suddenly unfollowing you and are not interested in your post. And so Instagram's like, whoa, there must be something funky going on here. There must be some bad posts. We're going to show this person's post to less people. So please don't remove or block or force unfollow a bunch of people from your account. My fourth and final tip for you to break out of the shadow ban is what I call the break in case of emergency strategy. If you've ever seen those, like, you know, fire alarms or there's like a fire extinguisher and it says like, break in case of emergency, you're not going to be doing this every day. You're not going to be doing this every month. You're probably not even going to be doing this more than once a year. But if you firmly believe that you are shadowbanned, if you are already, maybe you've already written it, or maybe you're seething watching me throughout this episode, you're going to leave this nasty comment about how you are shadow banned and I'm BS and you're unsubscribing and that's you. And you just can't, no matter what you do, break out of the shadow band. Then you can make a post that is directly calling out the shadow ban. Now, the algorithm is not gonna be like, oh, they got me. I'm gonna start showing their post to more people. But here's what you can do. You can make a post again, probably a carousel, so that it reaches more of your followers than non followers. And in that carousel or in that post, you can say, hey, I think I'm shadowbanned. If you are seeing this comment, hi. In the comments, basically calling out the fact that your engagement or your views have been super low and asking people, hey, are you even seeing this? Hello, mic check. Is this thing even on? Because that post will get a lot of engagement. It will also probably reach a lot of people. Unfortunately, this could lead to some of those people unfollowing you. If they're like oh this is annoying, why'd this person post this? Or oh yeah, I haven't seen her post in 3 years and I don't really mind that I haven't seen her post in three years. I'm going to unfollow her. That could happen. But what is also likely to happen is that a lot of people are going to engage. You're going to get a lot of views and then your subsequent follow up posts after that are also going to get more views. And if those posts are good posts, if they're engaging, if they have good hooks, if they're shareworthy, then it can snowball and you can move back in the positive direction where each post is kind of building off of the one prior. But again, I don't want you to do this strategy all the time. I only want you to use this if it is truly in case of emergency and if it is your last ditch effort to save your account and bring it back. And finally with all of that being said, the last and final thing that I would not recommend doing if you feel like you are shadow banned. Giving up. Do not give up. I know it's challenging. I know it sucks. I know it feels like everyone else is going viral. I know it feels like everyone else's engagement is going up and it's not true. The reality is for 95, 98% of us it's a slog. There are a few people who are just like viral post, viral post, viral post, viral post. But they're the anomaly, they're the exception. And they will probably eventually burn out and be at the exact same stage you are at. So please just take a deep breath and as Dory says in Finding Nemo, just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep posting, posting, posting, keep showing up, keep adding value, keep entertaining, keep creating share worthy content, keep improving 1% each day and eventually things will improve. I firmly believe that the biggest differentiator between those that have success on Instagram and those that do not is that the ones who have success, they just kept going. They had as many posts that flopped. They probably had more posts that flopped it as many posts, if not more that failed, that floundered, that didn't do well. They just kept showing up, they kept improving and they kept posting. They kept embracing the suck and moving forward anyways and eventually they did blow up. Eventually they did have success. Eventually they did grow the audience that they wanted. Thank you so much for watching today and as always, happy networking. It.
Host: Brock Johnson
Date: February 16, 2026
In this episode, Brock Johnson tackles the hot topic of the Instagram shadowban: what it is, why so many creators feel they’re affected, practical ways to diagnose if it’s actually happening to you, and — most importantly — science-backed strategies to break free from low reach “jail.” Brock’s clear, practical, and honest take dismantles fears around algorithmic “punishment,” setting the record straight on what really impacts reach and how to proactively boost your odds in 2026's hyper-competitive feed.
The “shadowban” is mostly a myth in 2026, and low reach is more often a product of fierce competition and supply-demand math than targeted punishment. Instead of chasing hacks, focus on:
As Brock closes:
“Just keep swimming. Just keep posting… eventually things will improve.”
For next steps on reviving a dead account, tune in to next week’s episode.