HACKER Q&A
📣 firtoz

Anyone else hit by Instagram moderation?


Many people I know have been affected and I'm unsure if it's a global thing or just my circle.

I have had my account repeatedly suspended and restored without any explanations.

I have seen other accounts also experiencing this. Some people and some organisations and businesses.

I have seen multiple people share that their harmless comments and posts have been flagged automatically and the appeal system has been erratic and unpredictable. I know multiple people in Meta (some at higher levels) and they all say "we cannot do anything" and to trust their appeals systems.

It's really turning me and my friends off the platforms and we are probably going to look for alternatives.

My theory is that they are upping their moderation thresholds after surges in spams, and they have an acceptable number of false positives, as long as they are happy with a significant reduction of bad actors, and that we are the unfortunate casualties of such false positives.

Have you experienced similar issues?


  👤 muzani Accepted Answer ✓
Always, constantly, appeals never work. It's well documented but nobody at Meta cares. Main reason I deactivated FB.

There's all kinds of reasons. One major symptom is when you get email notifications all the time of someone trying to log in to your account. VPN might be one but I've never been hit for it.

Another is they seem to hit lurker profiles more. Profiles without a proper pic or something AI looking.

Also friend groups. If your friends are bad guys, your odds if being flagged as a bad guy is quite high.

There's a detailed article on WA being used to target Israeli bomb targets, including the Where's Daddy protocol which hits groups of innocents at once based on who they're grouped with: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/


👤 idontwantthis
I keep getting warned that I’m suspected of being a bot. No idea why or what that even means.

👤 milkglass
I had left VPN on and got suspended presumably for that reason

👤 Desafinado
A couple years ago I set up a new account with my new e-mail address. Someone thought it was a spoof account and reported it.

And just like that I can no longer use my e-mail address on FB, and have to maintain a legacy e-mail address because FB is useless.