I'm Josh Bell. I post on Instagram as @vegasish, where a little over 500,000 people follow me. And I’m a lifelong data nerd.

For about a year I could tell inside the first hour whether a post was going to take off. The early engagement gave it away. I'd watch the first wave of engagement come in, and when it exceeded a certain pace, I knew that post was headed for a few million views.

That stopped working, and I can show you exactly how much.

Between late May and the end of December last year I posted 321 reels. This includes some in which I was added as a collaborator. May 2025 is a landmark month, because that’s when I shifted to posting political content.

Thirty-one of those reels passed a million views. Fifteen passed two million. My best did 14.5 million, though I should mention that it was not a political post. Still, I had political posts do as much as 8 million.

From January 1st of this year through July 21st when I collected the data for this case study, I posted 177 reels. Six have passed a million. My best did 2.2 million.

For what it’s worth, I'm posting less often than I was. Last year I averaged about 43 reels a month in total. If you exclude the collabs that I was added to, it’s about 31 a month, as I posted once a day. This year it's about 27/month. So using that rate is a better comparison than using the raw counts, as volume can’t explain a rate.

During that stretch last year roughly one in every ten reels I posted passed a million views. This year it's roughly one in thirty. Over the same stretch my ceiling fell from 14.5 million to 2.2 million. In April and May of this year, nothing I posted cleared a million at all. The best my content managed in those two months was 843k and 719k.

Same account. Same audience. Same kind of content, made the same way, hitting the same early markers that used to mean a million+ views were coming.

I noticed early on when this started happening. On January 2nd I wrote in a caption, "Instagram has penalized me hard in the last 5-6 weeks, diminishing my reach and growth." That was seven months ago. I still have no way of knowing the real reason why.

You could argue that the algorithm has “shadowbanned” me and point to inflammatory comments I’ve made about any one of this administration’s figureheads, or calling for the full release of the Epstein Files, etc. as reasoning. But there’s no way to know definitively what it was. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has said more than once that they don’t shadowban creators.

Instagram's answer to people in my position is a settings page called Account Status. It's supposed to tell you whether your content is eligible to be recommended. Mine has been clean this entire time. Green across the board, the whole way down.

Here is what Instagram itself says about that, in a post published under Adam Mosseri's name and live on their website right now:

"If anything makes your content less visible, you should know about it and be able to appeal."

I agree with every word. That sentence is a key reason for this petition. Instagram wrote it, published it, and has not built it.

Read their own ranking explainer and you find out why a clean Account Status doesn't mean what many creators think it means. Account Status reports whether you've violated the Recommendation Guidelines or Community Standards. Those are violations. Separately, and in addition, Instagram maintains a list of things it makes "less visible for other reasons." Their words. The current list includes low-resolution reels, watermarked reels, muted reels, reels with borders, reels that are majority text, and reels already posted elsewhere. Much of my content is exclusive to Instagram and my content that’s on other platforms went up on Instagram first.

None of those are violations. Nobody did anything wrong. There's no strike, so there is nothing for Account Status to report. Your account can be green across all four categories while your reels are being shown to fewer people, and both of those things can be true at once, and you would never see it anywhere in the app.

Instagram knows about this gap, because they described it themselves. In that same post they wrote that they were "experimenting with new notifications to help creators understand when the reach of their reel may be limited due to a watermark," and that they planned to expand on that. So in theory, there’d be notifications for other reasons why reach is limited.

If Account Status already covered these limits, there would be nothing to build. They were building a separate notification system specifically because Account Status doesn't cover them. That was three years ago. There is still no notification for anything else.

Then there's the list itself, which changes without telling anyone.

In June 2021, Instagram published that same sentence with one different item on it. The 2021 version read: "We also avoid recommending reels for other reasons, such as low-resolution or watermarked reels, reels that are muted or contain borders, reels that are majority text, or reels that focus on political issues."

Reels that focus on political issues. By the 2023 rewrite, that item was gone, swapped for "reels that have already been posted on Instagram." No announcement. No changelog. Both versions of that page are live on about.instagram.com today, which means Instagram currently gives you two different answers about whether political content gets demoted, depending on which of their pages you happen to land on.

I post political content. I'm not claiming the 2021 rule is still in force, because I can't know that and neither can other creators. That's the entire problem. The published list of what Instagram throttles gets rewritten without notice, creators aren't told when it changes, and nobody outside the company can say what's on it today.

So here's where that leaves me. My hit rate fell by two thirds. My Account Status is clean and always has been. There is a category of reach limits designed so it never appears in Account Status. The list defining that category has been edited at least once. And Instagram has been "experimenting" with notifying creators about one item on it since 2023.

Maybe there's a boring explanation. Maybe reels distribution shifted for everyone and I'm not a remotely special case. I would take that answer. But I can't get that answer, and neither can anyone else.

This is bigger than one account, and creators in other corners of the platform have been living with it far longer. In February, Dr Carolina Are at the London School of Economics published a study surveying 100 pole dancing creators, a community Instagram has been censoring since at least 2019, about their experience with Account Status.

Sixty-five percent said the notifications did nothing to improve their experience on the app. Seventy-two percent said the same about the appeals. They described a whack-a-mole cycle where content they'd already appealed got reflagged, and never being told whether an appeal was resolved or why. Her verdict was that Account Status is "a self-serving corporate box-ticking exercise" that dodges accusations of opacity "without meaningfully engaging in communications about governance."

Her paper finds this kind of suppression increasingly reaching political material as well. In December, the Guardian reported that Meta had shut down accounts connected to abortion advice and queer content. Meta denies censoring anyone based on advocacy.

Almost none of those creators can do what I did. I only know the size of my own drop because I pulled fourteen months of my content’s data and checked it post by post. Because of the size of my account and reach, the difference stands out sharply. Somebody with 4,000 followers watching their reach die has no way to really measure it, no way to find out why, and nobody at Meta who will tell them.

We're asking Meta to do three things, all of which follow from a sentence they already published.

1. Notify creators for every reach limitation. If a post or an account is made less visible for any reason, violation or not, say so in the app, at the time, and name the reason. You started building this in 2023 for one item on a six-item list. Finish it. And then update it on an ongoing basis.

2. Publish the current list where creators will actually see it, and log changes to it. Not the ranking weights. Nobody is asking for the recipe. Publish what can get content demoted, put it in the app instead of a blog post from several years ago, and date every change so creators can see when the rules change.

3. Make the appeal real. Meta's own words are "and be able to appeal." Today you can appeal a violation. You cannot appeal non-violation suppression, because you're never told it happened. Give creators a way to ask "was my reach limited, and why," and ensure an answer is returned within a reasonable, stated amount of time.

Instagram wrote that if anything makes your content less visible, you should know about it and be able to appeal. Every word of that is right. We're asking them to make good on it.

If your reach fell off a cliff and nobody has told you why, sign this. If it hasn't happened to you yet, sign it anyway, because there's no warning before it does. And if you don't post at all, sign it because the creators you follow can be suppressed without either of you ever being told.