On Instagram, Vote seems to be the new four-letter word.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. Karina. A content creator who goes by the username Mrs Frasold

recently noticed something strange happening

on her Instagram account.

The real life Ariel Fodor

is a former kindergarten teacher who has

more than 370,000 followers on the platform.

In her comical videos channeling her former profession to gently chastise misbehaving adults

sometimes score millions of views except it seems when she talks

about the election. Mrs. Frasled since she was being shadow-band by Instagram that's

when the algorithm reduces the visibility of some

posts. So Jeffrey Fowler, a tech columnist at the Washington Post, investigated.

So I did some deep analysis. I went through every single one of her posts from the last six months and I went into that detailed audience data and I said okay how many people is she reaching and then also I looked at stuff like well was

it her existing followers versus outside people and what I found was that whenever

she posted something even vaguely about politics or social issues, the size of her audience dropped about 40%

versus when she did content on non-political issues.

And then I said, okay, well let's be a little bit more fine-grain

here. What happens when she uses the word vote in her caption? When she does that,

the audience dropped, I think it was something like 63% versus her non-political stuff.

So again, it's a correlation, but it's a pretty strong one, and we've seen these numbers in data from other

organizations that have done researched into this. So given that sort of

...