What hashtags has Instagram banned?

Have you been experiencing a huge drop in engagement? It may well be because Instagram is hiding your posts because you are using a ‘banned’ hashtag.

Whilst Instagram has always had certain hashtags banned such as swear words ect. but this month (Feb 2018) more and more of really common hashtags haven’t been working which is resulting in users not having their posts shown to size of the audience they were reaching previously.

I first noticed a problem when ALL of my likes were from followers that i already had. It seems to be changing between whether your posts will shown in ANY hashtags if you use a ‘banned’ hashtag or whether your post will appear in the other hashtags that are working. For me if i used a banned hashtag my post wouldn’t show in any other hashtags i had put on the post.

It appears that different users are experiencing Instagram’s changes differently, which is even more frustrating to understand what is going on – what have you been experiencing?

Banned Hashtags

However, it is unsure whether these hashtags will be banned forever or whether they will suddenly start working again.

I can understand why Instagram is banning hashtags such as #foreplay due to problems with pornographic photos but I was quite shocked to see hashtags like #beautyblogger, #sallyhansen, #tgif ect. to be banned as these are used by so many users i know for completely acceptable/normal photos and reasons.

‘Broken Hashtags’

A way of telling if a hashtag is ‘broke’ is to search for the hashtag in the ‘tags’ search bar and then view the ‘recent’ photos. If it shows this message: “Recent posts from # are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines” it is ‘broken’.

Whilst I have occasionally seen this message before, the hashtag is normally back to normal within a few hours not last for days and days.

It’s unsure why Instagram is enforcing so many bans on such normal hashtags, why are they trying so hard to stop users growing their channel? Is it so users actually start paying to promote their posts to grow? Please leave a comment if you know why.

Feel free to leave your Instagram usernames in the comments so i can find and follow you (or follow me – @ellrachelx and i’ll follow you back). Try and support as many users as possible because unfortunately we are all going through the difficultly of trying to grow and it’s such a shame that people are actually giving up.