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Comment by nellophonic | Hacker News Reader

Funny you should say that. I'm not a big Instagram user, but have had an account for years. The company I work for has just started an Instagram campaign, and asked anyone who wanted to, to check out their campaign and give it a like. I did so, and a minute later received this email:

"Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.

If you think that we made a mistake, you have until 8 March 2027 to appeal."

I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

My latest rejection says I have only one more chance. No idea what the transgression was, but apparently there is no recourse.

I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.

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> I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.

If you were willing to upload your driver's license and passport for a mere chance at getting back an account you don't give a crap about I'd hate to see what you'd do for one you do care about! Facebook demanded my driver's license at one point out of the blue. I simply abandoned the account, I was already pretty over them at that point anyway. About a year later it let me log in just fine and had forgotten all about how badly it had needed a scan of my license for security. In fact I didn't even remember the password, it just auto logged in from an email link.

You kind of confirm what I suspected though, that they'll just keep asking for more stuff leaving you more exposed and they're under no obligation to actually give you the account back no matter what you do.

I don't use discord but IIRC I read that if your account was banned they were asking for a mobile number to get it back. Instead of getting it back if you complied they just added the mobile number to their ban list so you couldn't make a new account with it.

> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

That's not a good practice to begin with. Your insta account doesn't matter but your privacy and government-issued documents do matter.

Meta knows you work for them, and sees it as boosting or gaming the algo.

There are a gazillion accounts that do this constantly, and all of them appeal.

> uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport

Sounds like its working as designed. This is why you never cross streams between work and personal life.

> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

After the recent news about >150 million drivers' license photos being stolen from an ID verification service, I'd be very hesitant to do this for anything I didn't absolutely need. ID theft is a lot easier when someone has a photo of your sensitive documents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49561320

The sad thing is if you go through that final step you'll probably receive a permanent ban.

But if you go on Swapd right now and pay a Meta employee $500 while it's still in appealable state you'll get your account unlocked in an hour.

Make it make sense.

My wife lost her Facebook account because Facebook autolinked it to someone else's Instagram (not hers), then shut that one down for abuse.

No appeal process.

Luckily she didn't use Facebook much.

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