Here’s a real shocker: the tech industry actively marginalizes and throttles traffic to the firearm industry and the Second Amendment-friendly community in general. Over the last couple of months TTAG, Black Collar Arms (which I co-own), and I have been censored, throttled, rejected, and generally “shadow-banned.”
I tried to switch Black Collar over to a new email marketing service. Nope. They rejected us because of the industry we’re in. God forbid they should allow a licensed, regulated manufacturer to market a legal product to an opted-in email subscriber list.
There’s the full email thread, in case you’re curious (click the photo to enlarge it). As you can see, we were rejected because we fall into the nebulous, ill-defined category of “not acceptable content.”
Over at Meta-owned Instagram, here’s a screenshot of a message all three accounts (@guntruth, @blackcollararms, @callsignjeremy) received. The net result of this sort of shadow-banning or content throttling/restrictions on the accounts means fewer eyeballs.
With nobody seeing any of the posts on these accounts except for those who are already following the accounts, their growth potential is drastically stunted. Literally the only way a new person will find the account, other than searching for it directly (more on that later), is if a post is shared with them from someone who already follows it.
All three accounts — TTAG’s, Black Collar’s, and mine — semi-regularly receive warnings such as the one above. These aren’t posts attempting to sell anything. Not even on Black Collar’s account, but especially not at TTAG’s (we don’t sell anything) or my own personal account. Simply showing photos of firearms is enough to be censored.
Many firearm-related content creators have stopped using hashtags and stopped tagging other firearm-related companies in their photos. They’ve found that doing so triggers throttling and reduces the reach of their posts, as it helps Instagram identify them as gun-related content.
Here’s the full description of the policy. According to Instagram, simply posting a photograph of a firearm, a gun accessory, or ammunition constitutes showing or depicting fictional violence.
That’s right. To the delicate sensibilities of those who run the tech giants, a firearm photo is violence.
In case there’s any question about the specific post that was flagged for going against the guidelines, as the guidelines also mention accompanying text and hashtags, there it is in all its glory, above.
There were no hashtags on the post. As you can see, there was no attempt to sell gun stuff via Instagram. I’s just a “look at this cool stuff” post. As usual.
In addition to flagging the post for a content violation, Instagram also messaged to inform us that we could be getting more reach if we posted content that wasn’t all icky, violent, and horrible.
TTAG’s Facebook page rocketed to 398,000 followers at a steady, rapid clip over the course of about two years after we launched it. Then it slammed into a brick wall and…stopped. It has stayed perfectly steady at that number of followers for four to five years, then began to slowly shrink to today’s level of ~365,000 followers. Chalk that up to some natural attrition from previous followers combined with enough account censorship and throttling to prevent any potential new followers from learning about it.
Likewise, the TTAG, Black Collar Arms, and CallSignJeremy Instagram accounts have been almost perfectly stable in their follower counts for years.
If you’re on Instagram and you aren’t following us, this is a good time to change that. If you’re on Instagram or Facebook and you see posts that you like from firearm-related accounts that you follow, share them with your friends, to your Stories, etc.
And then there’s this . . .
Another way Instagram and other platforms censor or shadow-ban undesirables is by making their accounts extremely difficult to find. We saw this with “old Twitter” leading up to the last election and we see it now (yet again) with Google censoring Republican candidates from appearing in search results.
Many firearm-related accounts are nearly impossible to find in the search results. Whether you’re trying to find an account in the main search page or trying to tag an account in a photo, for many companies in the firearm industry or those that are just gun-related in general (like how my personal account is gun-related in the sense that most of the photos I post are of guns) they DO NOT appear in the search results unless you type their name in EXACTLY correctly down to the very last character.
Despite the platform’s search algorithms knowing perfectly well what you’re trying to type in based on various things like account size, popularity, and the types of accounts you already follow along with the likelihood that you’re, you know, searching for what you’re searching for, it will instead pre-populate dozens of suggestions of tiny, random, significantly less likely matches without ever showing you the one you’re actually looking for.
The only way to get to the account you want is to know its account name and type in EVERY letter and punctuation mark correctly. Or, as in this example of Smith & Wesson, it’ll display the real account — the one with all of the likes, followers, and traffic — at the very bottom of the list.
That, my friends, is a very long list of garbage accounts that are not Smith & Wesson’s actual account. Instagram knows damn well what I’m searching for because it’s, by far, the largest account on that entire list. It’s also “verified” with the blue check, plus it’s followed lots of people I follow and who also follow me, etc.
To be clear, these skewed search results happen even when you’re already following the account. Most of the time when I post one of my photos onto the @guntruth account and attempt to tag my @callsignjeremy account for photo credit, the account will not pop up in the selection bar until I type that final “y” in at the end.
All sorts of completely random crap comes up, but my account doesn’t appear anywhere on the displayed list at all until that last character is typed in. And @guntruth follows CallSignJeremy and vice-versa.
That’s some serious finger-on-the-scale BS.
But we aren’t surprised. It’s become a known part of dealing with social media and tech platforms of all kinds. We are part of a marginalized community that faces blatant, open discrimination by large, wealthy, ultra-powerful corporations and nothing is going to change that any time soon.
