Give Me Back My Sunsets! The time Instagram wrongly banned me (opens in new tab)

This is a stark reminder of why we shouldn't rely too much on social media accounts (especially those where we're the product because it's free).

Back in 2017, the same thing happened to me on Facebook. I was banned because of a post I made that included a picture of someone holding a magazine cover from an old Byte magazine issue - the description was the same "community guidelines, blah blah blah" and there was absolutely nothing about the picture that could be remotely inappropriate. The magazine cover just read "Is Unix Dead?" and the holder was fully clothed in a t-shirt and jeans.

However, for me that was a good wake-up call that made me realize how silly it was for me to have a Facebook account. I immediately deleted my account instead of waiting for the ban to be lifted and never looked back.

And luckily, Unix is not dead.

I browsed Instagram.com while on NordVPN. Instant ban. Had to wait weeks to get my account back by submitting reviews. This happened 3 times. I learned my lesson and simply blocked Instagram.com at the browser level so I never accidentally go to it while on VPN.

Such a shame that Meta's anti-spam algorithm can so easily misidentify good actors.

I'm a normal user. Private account. Just photos of nature I collected over 10 years. Never write comments on public posts.

My Mom recently got banned from X, she literally has never tweeted and just uses it to follow some family members. She sent in an appeal and got a seemingly auto reply rejection immediately that she will never be able to access X again. Even worse then this in the sense that they refused to even tell her what she was accused of. I am guessing her account got hacked and someone sent something objectionable. It is not the end of the world for her but she was pretty upset by it. It got me thinking how screwed I would be if google decided to ban me with no recourse. I think the complete lack of support in these situations should be illegal.

This must be terribly frustrating and I'm glad the author got things resolved. But it's baffling to me that they seem to want to continue to use Meta products. I guess if they're the 28th Instagram user they're pretty tied to them, love them, etc.? But wouldn't the fact that their accounts were banned for something so nasty they don't even want to write exactly what it was, a thing so bad that Meta said they'd have to inform "the authorities" about it, make someone say "yeah I'm done using these products"?

Good for the author to have connections within Meta to get this resolved. For anyone else, this would’ve been the end (and probably worse, if Meta did inform the authorities with whatever information it genuinely believed it had). In my experience, Instagram has more rogue bots and algorithms that ban accounts for nothing than Facebooking does.

I don’t get the author’s glee towards the end of the post. If the author’s livelihood depended on Instagram, sure, go back to the platform and be thankful the account was restored and that the connections in Meta helped. If not, time to move on. It’s not like Meta has been a benevolent corporation that deserves more chances.

BTW, other platforms aren’t safe against such actions either. The main competitor of this platform on the Fediverse has an official instance where your account could just go poof without any notices over emails, without any appeals process, without any response from the single admin, etc. I presume many Mastodon instances would operate similarly.

If your social media account is extremely important to you, your best account-and-content-preserving choice is to host it on an environment you control and hope that other instances don’t block you for their own random reasons.

Reminder to pay for your own domain and email hosting, preferably separately. I use fastmail personally and it was very easy to bring my own domain.

Nothing is perfect but you're a lot less likely to get erased because it's intern season and a bad model got pushed to abuse detection.

Be the customer, not the product.

I never got a reply to my appeal

I had a kafkaesque experience on Reddit: My >10 year account of daily use got shadowbanned for no discernible reason, I used their appeal-page, the appeal was "granted"... and nothing was fixed, except now the appeals page is unusable because it claims my account is in good standing.

I pulled up an old resume-review throwaway, and the exact same buggy black-hole mess happened.

So yeah, now I only lurk and I'm still bitter. I really need to revisit plans for my own blog.