Ask HN: Wife's Instagram account was deleted – what now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Wife's Instagram account was deleted – what now?

Today in the morning, she woke up and browsed her Instagram account on her phone. Suddenly, logged out and redirected to her other Instagram (work) account.

I tried to help her find a support ticket, but there is nothing even remotely close to that on "Metas" help page.

Any ideas? Has anyone experienced this before? Are there any Metamates who can help?

This is the email she tried to send them, but it went to void:

"I was on my Instagram page and suddenly got a message on Instagram that I’m logged off. I tried to log in and it said that my account can’t be found. I did not get any email from IG about my account disappearing or it logging out. What can be done in this situation?"

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They don't care. Honestly they are fighting a massive bot/spam problem. A good chance 90% of your wifes "followers" were bots. Explain this to her and go live your best life.

I feel sorry for your wife. I know a lot of people put a lot of time into their Instagram accounts and sometimes it may contain the only version of photos/stories that exist. It's easily dismiss-able by posters here who don't care about IG but I bet your wife feels pretty bad.

Unfortunately I can't help. Thanks for posting though.. it is a lesson for all of us. Backups and alternatives are important!

I don't know how important this is to you. Assuming it's very important, I would do the following:

- Find Instagram PMs on Twitter, DM as many as possible

- DM Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (from another account)

- Repeat the above on LinkedIn

It's an aggressive list of actions, but if getting the account back was really important to me I would try it.

“How to get seen as a crank”

On the contrary. I think people who don’t actually use Twitter are unaware just how magical DMs can be.

Or how much companies and govt workers care about twitter!

A friend ordered a moto phone from an ecommerce site that's now as good as shut down in India

Moto said phone was duplicate or something so they can't do repair

site said phone was sold 1yr ago we can't redund or replace. Issue is there was no IMEI number inside the phone. And the inly way of knowing it was to open the phone in a moto store

I tweeted cust support twitter and the ceo daily for a week

A week later he got an email saying they will refund but will use obscure 11th century mechanism and he'll get money in 15days

I tweet harassed said CEO again mocking him for using antique tech when he runs a tech firm.

Refund done within a few hours.

Coming to govt. I got 10x electricity bill. Called helpline they didn't pickup when in rare case calls were connected. This happened for 1 month and I almost gave up and decided to pay the money

Decided to rage tweet expecting 0 result as govt don't care like corporate

Posted 1 tweet looping in all state local and federal ministers. Forgot all about it and went to work. Imagine my surprise when I read an email that they found and fixed the issu3, apparently it was their mistake. Email was sent less than 30min after my tweet which amazingly had 0 likes 0 retweets and 0 indication that anyone has read it. Email subject: Twitter complaint regarding customer xyz.

Case in point: https://twitter.com/austen/status/1494763916466872323?s=21

As others have said, consider deleting the account. It's a waste of time, and no one but your family legitimately cares about your kids, vacation, wacky moments, etc. Vanity is a vice and you'll be better off abandoning this one.

Not to mention every other post is of a self proclaimed influencer who can't do jackshit

So this was her personal account? Not a business account?

My sister's business account was hacked (phished probably) and was contacted by the scammer asking for money to get the account back. IG's support is practically non-existent and their automated tools don't help at all if the scammer changes the username/email. She got it back a few days later by going through her state's government. Apparently they have contacts at FB/IG/etc to escalate cases affecting businesses based in their state. She got put in contact with this rep through a friend of a friend so I don't know how easy it is to make use of this "resource". You'd think it would be easy for IG to notice that an account being logged in from a new location, username changed, password changed, and email changed is probably a victim but their systems did nothing.

If it's a personal account your best bet is to make noise online, have a friend that works at IG, or do what the other comment here says about contacting IG PMs on Twitter which is a sad state of affairs. Whatever you do DO NOT pay anyone online promising to get the account back. There are plenty of people with "testimonials" of people they have helped, don't fall for it.

Take it as a good opportunity to ditch Instagram and Meta forever! ;)

I kind of love Instagram. There is no place like it. Ads are also on-point and something I'd buy. That said, I also love Pinterest that most HN community hates (and rightfully so, it is spamming search results). Where else can I subscribe to Vaporware aesthetics channel and find similar images of 1980's K-mart receipts? Pinterest is absolutely incredible for this sorts of things. Instagram is visual culture. No politics, no rage, no clickbaits, just super cool images - you could probably do those things but that's not how I use it. It is the least toxic place for me on the internet and I love it.

Got mine closed for no reason at all (didn't post a single picture in months, but supposedly my last one was against their TOS).

Got into the mugshot bot loop for weeks and weeks. Absolutely nothing.

Reached out to Facebook Legal. Nothing.

Ended up ditching Facebook and Instagram. Won't look back.

> Are there any Metamates

I can't be the only one who laughed at this!

Same thing happened to me 2 months ago, appealed, got reply, took photo proving identity, "nothing we can do", so I gave up, might not be your best course of action but I didn't want the stress of fighting it so created a new one and added my friends again. I then created a backup of my friends list just in case it happens again.

that’s why you should create a personal website with photos for your wife (if it’s not just a few photos but seriously deal or even business). great example of why social medias are garbage and ppl have to look at indie web idea.

Reminds me of the time I got banned from Tinder because I uploaded a meme.

Haven't used it since then, but I also didn't miss it.

I have to admit, I would be sad if I lose my Twitter account.

This is an extremely biased take based on my own opinion, but... maybe it's better to just pretend they did you guys a favor and stop using IG?

I have heard so people got Instagram accounts deleted and complaining on reddit. According to them, basically they tried everything and nothing worked.

Since when is this site a tech support forum?

I see these issues quite frequently so at least for the last 5 years.

Since the big tech companies have been horrendous at customer service and there are often people on here who work at them who can actually help. So basically from the time this site began.

Have you tried reset password?

Stop. Depending. On. FAAANG.

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