Ask HN: Anyone else hit by Instagram moderation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone else hit by Instagram moderation?

5 pointsfirtoz6 comments

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?

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/

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

Same here. I wonder if it’s easier to get flagged when accessing Instagram via a web browser on a computer…? I would guess that something like 90-95% of all “normal” users access Instagram via the iOS/Android apps whereas a large majority of bot users might be from web browser + desktop OS.

I often get a warning message like this:

“To prevent your account from being temporarily restricted or permanently disabled, ensure that no other users or tools have access to your account and that you're following our Terms of Use. Also consider changing your password to a stronger one to prevent unauthorised access to your account by third parties.”

FWIW, I don’t use any VPN service.

Last year or so my account was severely restricted for a long periods, at least 3-4 weeks or more. I can’t remember if I couldn’t login at all, or maybe it was just that I couldn’t like any posts at all.

IG probably have lots of bots accessing the service but becoming a false positive is very irritating. Luckily I don’t really rely on IG that much, so being restricted is actually quite good for me. More time to spend on HN instead ;-)

me too. in my case it's because ublock is, well, doing its job

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

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.

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