TikTok
Am I shadowbanned on TikTok?
TikTok has never used the word "shadowban" and never will. It does document five separate states that produce what creators mean by it — content that stays live while reaching almost nobody. Each has its own name, its own cause and its own remedy, and only one of them notifies you.
Written for: “am i shadowbanned on tiktok”
What TikTok documents instead
Every state below is described in TikTok's own published material. Working out which one applies to you matters, because the responses are different and three of the five are not appealable at all.
Ineligible for the For You feed
Your content stays live and stays on your profile. It is excluded from recommendation, so it reaches almost nobody new. People can still find it through search or by going to your account.
Governed by the For You feed Eligibility Standards, published 14 August 2025 and effective 13 September 2025.
Not eligible for recommendation
The same thing, applied to one video and labelled on that video, with a reason and an appeal button.
This is the per-video form and the only one of these states TikTok actively tells you about.
Account restriction for deceptive behaviour
TikTok's own wording is that it may limit your ability to post new content, to appear in top search results, or to appear in the For You feed.
Account-level rather than per-video, and the state most creators mean when they say the word shadowban.
Strikes
A removal plus a mark against the account. Thresholds scale with severity, and there are separate thresholds for comments and for LIVE.
Strikes expire after 90 days, which is why an account can recover without doing anything in particular.
Content levels and age-restriction
A maturity score gates your content away from 13–17 year olds, shrinking the audience it can be shown to.
No violation, no strike, and no notification. This is the state most often mistaken for a shadowban, because nothing anywhere tells you it happened.
Why "shadowban" is still a useful word
Platforms dislike the term because it implies something secret and punitive, and most of these states are neither. But a creator who keeps posting normally, receives no notification, and reaches a fraction of their usual audience is describing something real, and the platform documents that it happens.
The accurate version is: TikTok documents a state in which your account is deprioritised in search and in the For You feed while you keep posting normally and receive no notification. That is the thing people mean, in the platform's own words.
What no tool can tell you
No third party can confirm a restriction. TikTok exposes no status, no flag and no endpoint that reports one, so every checker you will find infers from public numbers. Some of those inferences are reasonable. None of them is a confirmation, and any tool that says "you are shadowbanned" as a verdict is overstating what it can know.
The one authoritative source is your own account status page inside the app. It reports strikes and account-level restrictions directly, from TikTok.
PodSwap does not publish a TikTok checker. An honest one needs daily per-video history over months plus a cohort of comparable accounts to compare against, and building it without both produces confident nonsense.
Common questions
Does searching for my own username prove anything?
Very little. Search results are personalised, cached and inconsistent between devices, and not appearing in your own search is as likely to be a caching artefact as a restriction. Check your account status page instead.
Do hashtags cause shadowbans?
There is no published banned-hashtag list and no documented mechanism by which a hashtag restricts an account. Hashtags that attract policy-violating content can attract review to the video that used them, which is not the same thing.
Can I be restricted without any strike?
Yes, and this is the most misunderstood part. A maturity rating shrinks your audience with no violation, no strike and no notification.
Does a new account get restricted automatically?
No. New accounts have no history for the system to draw on, which produces high variance rather than suppression.
Read next
How to check your TikTok account status
TikTok has one authoritative source: the account status page inside the app, which reports strikes and account...
Ineligible for the For You feed
"Ineligible for the For You feed" is TikTok's own name for content that does not break a rule badly enough to...
How long TikTok restrictions last
There is no single answer, because there is no single restriction. Strikes expire 90 days after they are appli...