Has anyone had an Instagram Reel suddenly get pushed heavily to the wrong country/audience?

I manage social media for a U.S.-based food brand, and we recently had a Reel take off, but for some reason a very high percentage of the views were coming from Iran.
Within a pretty short period of time, we gained 600+ new followers from Iran.
Normally growth would obviously be great, but our products are only sold in the U.S., so this audience isn't relevant to our actual customer base.

I ended up taking the Reel down from instagram because I was concerned that all of the new followers and engagement would start signaling to Instagram that this is the audience it should continue pushing our content to. Luckily the Facebook reel was not affected by this and I left it up.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

Did your audience eventually correct itself once you went back to posting content targeted toward your normal audience?

Did you remove any of the new followers, or just leave them? And did you notice your reach in your target country drop afterward?

Would love to hear what happened to anyone who has dealt with this and whether there’s anything you did that helped get your content back in front of the right audience.

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BP041•about 2 hours ago•1

This is common when the initial engagement spike comes from a region—Instagram's algo doubles down on that demo. If you don't have location restrictions in your settings, it'll keep pushing there. I've seen brands handle this by keeping the reel up but targeting future posts to US-only in audience controls.

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