Instagram has launched a new tool to let users know if their posts are being left out of recommendations to other users, an occurrence known as “shadow banning.”

While previously, people never found out if there posts were being banned, now Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said that the decision would help lead to more “transparency.”

“Sometimes your account can end up in a state where it’s not eligible for your photos and videos to show up in [our] recommendations,” he said.

“If you have posted things that violate our ‘recommendability’ guidelines or recommendation guidelines… you can end up in a state where your content won’t be recommended,” Mr Mosseri explains.

To check whether posts are eligible for recommendations, one can go to Account Status by clicking on Account under Settings tab available on their profile.

“The platform did not notify us about shadow banning,” said Dr Carolina Are, a content moderation researcher at the Centre For Digital Citizens at Northumbria University.

“For ages, Instagram denied that it was ever a thing.”

Dr Are is also a content creator on Instagram, where she often posts videos as a pole dance instructor – and says she has experienced so-called shadow banning herself.

“I personally received an apology [from Instagram] for the shadow ban of pole-dancing in 2019,” she said.

“They said the hashtags were blocked ‘in error’… this is essentially shadow banning.”

Dr Are is not the first person to have her content moderated by Instagram. Several other celebrities have experienced it too.

Former Australian basketball star Andrew Bogut was shadow-banned last month for sharing “false information” even though it was directly sourced from a government site.

“I still think it’s a bit of a cosmetic and performative change,” Dr Are said.

“As good as this is, without investing in human moderation, we are just going nowhere.”