Update, December 9, 2020: It appears hashtags in the"Recent" tab are no longer restricted. Instagram may choose to disable the feature again in the future, so I'm keeping this blog post up, just in case.

If your business relies on Instagram to build customer awareness and engagement, you may have noticed that some hashtag-related features were recently disabled.

For example, if you try to search for posts on a specific hashtag, you’ll get a banner warning that reads: 

“Recent posts from all hashtags are temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election.”

Here’s an example of what that banner looks like at the top of the Instagram app:

On desktop, the banner loads at the bottom of the page: 

This banner links to a help article that states:

“Recent posts from all hashtags may be temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the 2020 US election. Instagram is committed to reducing the spread of false information and giving people accurate information about voting.

We may remove the Top or Recent posts in a hashtag page if people are using the hashtag to post content that goes against our Community Guidelines. Learn more about our Community Guidelines.”

The US election was held on November 3, 2020, but hashtag-related features, like the “Recent” tab, are still disabled or limited nearly a month later. So, as another entrepreneur put it to us recently, “WTF is up with Instagram hashtags?”, or why are "Recent" posts still hidden on Instagram?

Short-Term: Get used to it

In the short term, it looks like Instagram will continue to keep this banner up and continue to limit hashtag-related features. With the current political climate, it’s highly unlikely Instagram (or its parent company, Facebook), will lift the restrictions until they are certain that the spread of misinformation on the platform has been reduced significantly or they have come up with a better solution. 

This could go on until the electoral college casts their votes on December 14, 2020, but will likely extend through Georgia’s senate runoff elections, which will be held on January 5, 2021, and subsequent vote counting. The most likely scenario is that the restrictions will continue through, and potentially beyond, Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021. This is because there’s a high likelihood misinformation will continue to be a problem on platforms like Instagram. 

So, what should you do with your Instagram Feed posts? We recommend continuing to use relevant and appropriate hashtags in your posts. This will ensure that when these features come back in the future, your posts will still be searchable. In the meantime, we suggest sharing your Instagram Feed posts in your Stories to boost awareness and engagement among your current followers. These Stories should have a clear call-to-action (CTA, for short), and one of the best  CTAs you can use right now is to ask your followers to re-share your post with their followers. Other CTA options include asking followers to like, comment or favorite your post. 

Long-Term: These features will come back

In the long-term, we believe there is a high likelihood Instagram will bring back hashtag-related features. After all, hashtags make it easier for Instagram users to discover and follow new accounts, which in turn should increase the amount of time these users spend in the app. The more time an Instagram user spends in the app, the more ads they will see, and the more money Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) will make selling those ads. 98% of Facebook’s revenue came from advertising last year, so it’s unlikely they will keep hashtag-related features on Instagram completely hidden for good. 

Having worked in the tech world for a while, we’re familiar with how decisions get made, and our best guess is that Instagram is either: a) waiting for the amount of and spread of misinformation to stop or slow down, or b) creating automated ways to filter out, or identify and label, misinformation. They could even be attempting both of these options right now, and the decision to turn hashtag-related features back on likely goes up to some of the highest levels of leadership at the company.

Research has shown that misinformation peaks during election cycles, so if they are attempting to wait it out, it could take a while. At the same time, building an automated filter or label for potential misinformation could also be slow, given that Instagram content is both written and visual, and a filter would need to screen every hashtagged post with a reasonable amount of accuracy in order to keep Instagram users happy. Instagram has about 1 billion monthly active users (MAU), or people who sign onto the app at least once every 30 days, and many of these users create new Instagram Feed posts every day. With this level of volume, it’s extremely unlikely the company would opt to have anyone manually screen hashtagged posts for misinformation -- it’s just too high of an investment. 

Combatting misinformation is also not something the company has been known for doing particularly well over the last few years. Our best advice to entrepreneurs and business owners is to sit tight, monitor the situation and use workarounds for now, because it could be weeks or months until hashtag-related features are back.