Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram

The Markup investigated Instagram's handling of Israel-Hamas war content through screenshot and metadata review, interviews with 20 affected users, and hands-on testing across 82 new and 14 existing accounts, including experimental hashtags created to probe visibility. It found nongraphic war images were roughly 8.5 times more likely to be hidden from hashtag search than other content, with initial visibility as low as 6 of 19 tested images versus 92-95 percent visibility for non-war posts, and captions containing hashtags were repeatedly deleted without notifying users.

Testing also showed inconsistent hashtag suppression, one test hashtag returned zero results despite indexing over 100 posts, another was briefly restricted before being restored, and found accounts flagged for spam violations lacked a functioning appeal option, unlike other enforcement categories. The report notes Meta lowered its automated confidence threshold for removing content in some Middle East regions from 80 to 40 percent, and concludes these overlapping failures amount to something broader than classic shadowbanning, with Meta attributing many cases to bugs rather than policy.