Instagram has yet again limited the reach of us knife makers. I felt the need to speak up.
We knew this was happening a long time ago and Maylee and I did as much as possible to negate their restrictions. I’ve been building our Instagram community for over three years now, and it's incredibly disappointing to witness increased censorship on not just my own channel but on that of my peers and industry friends.
If you couldn’t tell, we completely revamped our content strategies, so we could produce videos less focused on the knives we make. We worked tirelessly to find a happy medium where we could be true to ourselves and keep Instagram off our tail. We were able to get by for a while, but in the past few weeks, our reach was throttled abruptly. Regardless of our content tactics that aligned with Instagram's “policies”, we knew that this would happen eventually
500+ posts and videos with the #wachtmanknifeandtool tag? Gone, no longer accessible to us or other users. This was a devastating blow and proverbial punch in the face by a company that encourages small businesses to grow on their platforms.
What does this mean for Wachtman Knife and Tool and Instagram?
We will continue to publish our videos, posts, and stories as usual. We understand that some people can still see our content and it would be a disservice to our community to completely stop posting on a platform that we've been building for over three years. We are going to retire the #wachtmanknifeandtool tag in our posts however, since users can no longer lookup the tag and find our content. Obviously our main page is still accessible (for how long, who knows) but until Instagram decides that our “unsafe and dangerous” media isn’t actually that bad, you may have a difficult time seeing our content. It is clear the Meta platforms don’t want people and businesses like us around, but we will persist.
What Can You Do?
If you are frustrated at what Meta has done to our knife community, I would highly recommend switching platforms. We are consistently posting on Youtube, X (Twitter), and Reddit and intend on growing those platforms to combat the restrictions we’re seeing on Instagram. You can also sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch with the latest and greatest here at WKT.
As always, I couldn't thank you guys enough. Your continued support and encouragement through the years is short of mind blowing. I can assure you WKT will not stand down.
Links to our other platforms:
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@wachtmanknifeandtool
