TikTok showed our 420 posts to nobody. Here is what it actually demotes.

Part three of the running story of one person, one terminal, and a marketing department that is a cron job. Parts one and two are below this on the build log. This one is about the day the numbers stopped making sense, what the research actually said, and the part I got wrong.

The grid

I opened the TikTok profile grid on my phone and looked at the view counts. The reels our factory makes were landing somewhere between 70 and 260 views each. Not viral, but alive, and consistent.

Except one format. The Daily 420, our standing 4:20pm appointment with a cannabis anthem, drifting leaves and smoke, was sitting on zero. Every single one. The odd one showed a count of one, and that one was me.

Same account. Same posting slots. Same caption template. Same pipeline. One variable changed, and the result went from hundreds to nothing, every time, for weeks.

That is not a weak format. That is a decision.

What I assumed, and what I asked the agent to find out

My first read was the folk explanation: shadowban. And my second thought was worse: that a run of dead posts was dragging the whole account down, because overall views had also drifted from around 200 a post to around 100 over the same period.

So I did two things. I told the agent to stop the 420 posts on TikTok, immediately, with a switch so I could bring them back. And I asked it to go and find out, from TikTok's own documents rather than creator lore, what the platform silently demotes.

The first part took ten minutes. The second part corrected me.

TikTok does not have a word for shadowban. It has a tier.

TikTok never uses the word. Its vocabulary is FYF Ineligible, as in not eligible for the For You feed, and every policy page in its Community Guidelines carries the same four-step ladder as coloured headers: Not Allowed (removed), FYF Ineligible and Age-Restricted, FYF Ineligible, and Allowed.

Under the second of those, verbatim, sits this line:

"Showing or promoting cannabis or cannabis-related items, or adult tobacco use"

So the post publishes. It sits on your profile. Anyone who visits can see it. It is simply never placed in a single For You feed, which on TikTok is where roughly 73 percent of all views come from. Zero is not a glitch. Zero is the documented, expected outcome.

Three doors I had hoped were open turned out to be closed. "Showing or promoting" means depicting rather than endorsing does not help. Legality where the viewer lives does not restore eligibility, it only changes whether the post is also removed. And there is nothing to appeal, because from TikTok's side nothing went wrong: ineligibility is a distribution decision about content it has chosen to allow, not a violation. The only remedy was to stop posting the category. Done.

The part I got wrong

The account-level drift, from about 200 views a post to about 100, was not the dead posts dragging everything down. It was the platform.

Three large datasets say the same thing. Socialinsider, across two million videos, found accounts with one to five thousand followers averaged 860 views a post in 2024 and 350 in 2025, a 59 percent drop, while big accounts gained. Metricool, across 2.3 million posts, has views down 31 percent year on year. Buffer, across 11.4 million posts, puts the median TikTok post at about 500 views, flat regardless of how often you post.

And there is a ceiling nobody talks about. New Zealand has about two million adult TikTok users. Against TikTok's global reachable audience that is roughly 0.13 percent, one seven-hundredth of the pool a generic music account plays into. That is arithmetic, not a penalty.

So a small New Zealand account posting region-specific music content in 2026, landing 70 to 260 views a post and sliding a little, is performing exactly as the data predicts. Nothing to fix there. The agent had written my original theory into a code comment before the research came back, and then went back and corrected the comment, the docs and the commit message. I would rather have that on the record than a tidy story.

What everyone says that turns out to have no source

The research also retired a list of things I had half-believed:

• The "300 view jail." No TikTok document contains a single number about initial distribution. The behaviour creators describe is real and follows from ranking mechanics. The numbers are invented.
• Posting too often gets you penalised. Buffer's data has median views essentially flat from one post a week to eleven or more.
• "Link in bio" gets you demoted. No evidence anywhere. Caption links are not even clickable.
• Banned hashtag lists. The #420 and #weedtok tag pages return perfectly normal responses. The tags were never the problem. The subject was.
• TikTok seeds locally then expands. The region signal is a viewer-side promise that people see some local content. Nothing describes an expansion path for a creator's video.

What was actually worth acting on

Not the cannabis. The music.

Our reels are clips of commercial music videos. Under the letter of the same guidelines that is "reused or unoriginal content posted without creative edits", which is itself FYF ineligible, no complaint from a rights holder required. And a business account only gets the Commercial Music Library in the app, while the API cannot attach sounds at all, so a pipeline like ours bakes audio into the file, which bypasses the platform's rights matching rather than satisfying it. That touches every post, not one format in seven. It was already in our own notes from August. It is now the top of the list.

How to check your own account, properly

View count is not the test. TikTok says so itself: a video not getting many views "doesn't necessarily mean it broke a rule." The real tests are two notices most people never look at. Per video: Creator tools, Analytics, Content, tap a post, read Traffic source. A demoted post shows almost nothing from For You. Some show an explicit "not eligible for the For You feed" bar. Account level: Settings and Privacy, Account, Account Status. If nothing there is flagged, suppression is a theory, not a finding.

Where this leaves us

The 420 lane is off on TikTok, behind one environment variable. It still runs on Facebook and Instagram, where it has never had this problem. The agent's research is filed in the vault with every quote and URL, and a new version of TikTok's guidelines lands on 24 September, so the quotes get re-checked then.

And I have a fortnight of clean data coming, because the same afternoon we changed the Facebook and Instagram cadence too. That is next week's post.