The artificial intelligence was launched last year and is simply getting faster and more educated, which means up to 80% of users who have used growth services in the past are at risk of getting their account shadowbanned or even outright deleted within the next six months.

Last year, it was a few spotty reports but as the AI learns to spot suspicious behavior more accurately, it is able to move quickly and is targeting the USA this year. In fact, the algorithms are now targeting users who are purchasing boosts, as well as users who hire services that require them to give away their login credentials.

Here is his research in more detail:

• It is obvious that Instagram’s artificial intelligence engine is more rapidly able to spot and shadow ban Instagram users over time, and any Instagram user who has ever paid for the traffic or used any third-party Instagram service that required providing their login credentials is at a high risk of being shadowbanned at some point in 2020.
• Any Instagram user who has ever purchased bot traffic has roughly an 80% chance of their account becoming shadow banned or banned, which is a huge increase from 2019 when the crackdown first began and only a few users were reporting this issue.

The problem is, even when we played with different quality bots by testing those on our accounts the results were the same, both high and low-quality bots resulted in a shadowban. While it statistically mattered how many bots subscribed to the account and the source of where they were coming from earlier or later the account got shadowbanned and followers were removed. For low-quality bots (cheap) 5 out of 10 accounts got shadowbanned in the first week, 7 out of 10 in the first month and 10 out of 10 in 6 months. For high-quality bots (aged accounts) it was 3 out of 10 in the first month, 6 out of 10 in 3 months and 8 out of 10 in 6 months (yes, 2 got out alive).

It’s not only bots that can get your account shadowbanned though, but any third-party service also has an equal chance of harming your Instagram profile. Any time you give your Instagram password to someone, Instagram knows, which is not a problem when it’s a one-time instance, but any professional service looks suspicious to the Instagram algorithm.

Now, here is where the beauty of Instagram’s creativity lies. Instead of outright banning the IP behind these services, which will simply result in changing that IP by the service and the game will start all over again, Instagram shadowbans all people whose accounts have been accessed from that IP.

This at the same time nullifies the results (if there were any) the service had on the account and punishes the users who broke the rules – beautiful.