Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

I'm in this boat with Instagram. My account is permanently banned, and I didn't do anything.

And I mean that literally. I have never done anything with the account. I created it years ago, but I never got around to posting a photo or anything. It's just an account with no activity.

When I try to login, I see this:

> Your account has been permanently disabled because it didn't follow our Community Guidelines. This decision can't be reversed either because we've already reviewed it, or because 30 days have passed since your account was disabled. Learn more about why we disable accounts in our Community Guidelines.

So, it's an issue of community guidelines, so what are those? Presumably this: https://help.instagram.com/477434105621119

Those guidelines are all about content, and of course I didn't post any.

My next thought is maybe someone (like a spammer) took over my account and posted something bad. But I have a strong, machine-generated random password, so that seems unlikely.

So I tried contacting support through the mobile app (since I can't through the web site), and a bot sent me a 5-digit number and asked me to reply with a photo of myself holding a piece of paper with that number. I did that and got no response. (But maybe because the ban is permanent I wasn't supposed to be able to contact support.)

It's probably because you had no activity. Someone may have run out of ideas for deleting bot accounts and wrote a query that caught idle accounts with no posts.

The exact same thing happened to me recently, and yet I had some activity, though not much. And there was absolutely no content in my account that could be construed as violating any terms of use. I posted pictures like once or twice a year.

Suddenly my account was disabled, with instructions to send an image of myself holding up some code; but nothing has happened since I sent it.

I wonder if any due diligence is done on approximating good user impact from a hypothetical like this, or if they would just YOLO it.

I've had the exact same thing happen to me twice on IG. Same as you: no activity other than a filled out profile, both times banned for not following "Community Guidelines." An extremely frustrating experience when all I wanted to do was look at my friends' photos.

I had a similar thing. I wanted to get invoices and billing stuff from FB for the company I work at. Created a FB account specifically for the purpose, as I don't have a personal account. Then got hit with the banhammer.

And yet when you report stuff that is blatantly in violation (such as spam porn bots), they say that it doesn’t violate the guidelines

I got banned from IG before I could even log in the first time. I signed up with an email address since I don't have a FB account, and on my first login attempt it said my account was banned. I figure it's the same dark pattern that twitter does where they give you the "option" to not give them your phone number, but they'll auto-ban you and say they need a phone number to verify you're human.

This one sucks (for twitter at least) because I don't give out my number because I'm deaf. Seriously, I won't even give the hospital my number, just my email.

Why? Because every appointment they'd ring me, even though if they pull up my details it said "Do not ring, deaf, please text or email" - eventually I just changed my number. So much "private calls" I was just not going to pick up (even if I can hear, I feel it's better to completely understand what the other person is saying.)

On Twitter tho, when you make different handles for say businesses or what have you, you run into the same issue. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I thought it seemed pretty weird that _every_ account needed a unique phone number attached. The non-profits I'd help out with on social media don't have a contact phone number...

Seems like a great way of making people just give up rather than bothering to jump through hoops.

> And I mean that literally. I have never done anything with the account. I created it years ago, but I never got around to posting a photo or anything. It's just an account with no activity.

Maybe you got caught up in a sweep for "coordinated inauthentic activity." IIRC, the groups that do that sometimes stockpile inactive accounts for amplifying things in the future. e.g.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/technology/ch...:

> On Twitter, Mr. Gal-Or’s video was shared by many accounts with suspiciously bare digital personas, according to Darren Linvill, who studies social media disinformation at Clemson University. This, he said, is a characteristic sign of a coordinated operation.

> Of the 534 accounts that tweeted the video from April through the end of June, two-fifths had 10 or fewer followers, Professor Linvill found. One in nine had zero followers. For nine accounts, Mr. Gal-Or’s video was their first tweet.

Yep. A lot of the spam algorithms penalize new accounts, so spammers started making them months or years in advance to sit idle. Now that’s a spam flag.

At this point, companies should just suck it up, hire (more) real human moderators, and deal with the spam manually.

This implies that these companies care enough about their users' experiences to do something "expensive" like that.

The amount of spam created by computers can always outweigh the effort required to clean it up by humans. Hence enlisting computers to fight the spam before it gets posted.

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