I Am Trapped in Insta-Purgatory with No Recourse

Posting this on the off chance that a Meta engineer reads it.

I've had my account falsely flagged by an automated review system. I cannot follow any public user without getting a modal that says:

"Some accounts prefer to manually review followers even when they're public. Let us know if you think that we've made a mistake."

Then my profile goes to "Flagged" in the follower list. The user is not notified. The only workaround is to ask users to follow me, but then they get scary warnings when doing so.

My account status page shows no problems. I actually paid for verification and I'm still "flagged"? Support also said they couldn't remove the flag because it was set by an "automated review system".

This is all despite me being a normal user of the app for 3+ years, I've never engaged in any spammer-like behaviour (I've never even had links in my bio). All I do is post occasional updates and like comments and posts from others.

It's a serious impediment because insta is the go-to IM app here, especially for making personal connections. It's costing me trust and social connections. I can't be the only one affected, so I think it's worth investigating.

My handle is in the blog post.