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Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

thesun.co.uk

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Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#31

Post by adamrezich »

dncornholio wrote: post #22
adamrezich wrote: post #15

my mom got banned from facebook a month ago for having, months earlier, enthusiastically replied to a friend's post about some upcoming trip with a hyperbolic comment saying she'd "sell a kidney to be able to go with her". after helping her resolve the issue (had to clear all fb cookies, otherwise she was just presented with a blank page, making even beginning the unbanning process impossible), I warned her, next tim…

I don't think Facebook let's you know why they banned someone specifically, or do they? It could be; you assume it would be for this comment, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities that something else triggered it, right?

I did not see the actual screen where it shows you what you were banned for, I just helped my mom submit her driver's license photos and so forth, and it wasn't until a couple days later that she was presented with a screen that, by her description, was essentially identical to the twitter screen that shows you your offending tweet, and asks you to remove it in order to continue using the service.

EDIT: found the photo my mom took of the ban screen https://i.imgur.com/VeA3Nz2.png

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#33

Post by mitchdoogle »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #21
darekkay wrote: post #16

That's one of the reasons to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). If Instagram ever bans my account and even if the federated Pixelfed instance I've chosen will be taken down, all my photos will be still available on my personal homepage.

This is not a silver bullet and it gives you a false sense of security. I have had a domain name stolen by a registrar and I have had web hostings suspended. It's literally impossible for an individual to not be dependant on MANY 3rd party for making your website accessible online.

Well then just make your own domain registrar, duh.

In seriousness though, it's been much less likely historically for registrars to take sites down than for social media to ban users.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#34

Post by MerelyMortal »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #26
dav1app wrote: post #4

I am one of the suspended account. Yesterday was election day in Brazil, but I didn't manifested any political positions. Imagine how hard was for Brazilians to think about why this has happened.

Why would any Brazilian think an American social network that is about posting pictures of your Sunday brunch has any link to the Brazilian elections?

Some people will be posting political content and then get banned, they won't care where the company is located, they'll just see that they were banned after posting political content.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#35

Post by AnonHP »

skunkworker wrote: post #6

It happened to me this morning. And going from this Reddit thread and twitter it’s pretty widespread and also random. https://reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/yibnws/does_this_nor... And Instagram support on twitter responded https://twitter.com/InstagramComms/status/158708556379401830...

Whatever “support” Instagram pretends to have deleted its tweet sometime later.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#36

Post by darekkay »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #21
darekkay wrote: post #16

That's one of the reasons to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). If Instagram ever bans my account and even if the federated Pixelfed instance I've chosen will be taken down, all my photos will be still available on my personal homepage.

This is not a silver bullet and it gives you a false sense of security. I have had a domain name stolen by a registrar and I have had web hostings suspended. It's literally impossible for an individual to not be dependant on MANY 3rd party for making your website accessible online.

> This is not a silver bullet and it gives you a false sense of security.

Depends on your expectations. I'm aware that I can lose the access to my domain, server host or DNS. Personally, I see those chances lower than losing access to Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/Google. But even if I do lose my own website, I can register a new domain, restore my VPS backup and have my website back online. That's not something that is usually possible after Big Tech bans you. Also, POSSE encourages you to syndicate your content, so I have multiple copies of the same content, making it more resilient. If both my social media and my website get banned at the same time, then losing my published writing and photography content will probably be the least of my problems.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#37

Post by AnonHP »

I’m not at all surprised by this. Instagram has banned accounts for no good reason (no policy or TOS violations) for a long time. Seems like the bots just went wilder this time around.

Social media accounts are not your own. They’re leased to you at the pleasure of the bots and “machine learning” algorithms that determine what’s appropriate (for their owners to make more money) and what’s not.

A few more incidents like this is all we need to bid good riddance to this platform that treats its users with so much disdain.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#38

Post by dmonitor »

malfist wrote: post #13
bheadmaster wrote: post #10

I'm just hoping that if enough of these "incidents" happen, people will eventually stop using proprietary social media applications and use something free (as in freedom) and decentralized like Mastodon.

I don't think social media being down for a couple hours is a big enough inconvenience for most people to care.

If accounts are permanently deleted, I could see there being fallout

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#39

Post by klyrs »

jp57 wrote: post #29

Sounds like a big MLops failure, a bad model or threshold combined with bad monitoring or controls.

> "Earlier it was crashing every 10-20 seconds and now they have suspended my account for no reason," another said.

This sounds like the app was in a crash-loop. If it was getting far enough to start authorization, it would generate traffic indistinguishable from a hack attempt. An automated circuit-breaker there is probably best-practice.

There are a lot of places where automated "moderation" is a terrible idea but it looks to me (somebody who is generally anti-Meta and more generally anti-social-media) like a good circuit-breaker doing its job.

Re: Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

#40

Post by ridgered4 »

adamrezich wrote: post #31
dncornholio wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Facebook let's you know why they banned someone specifically, or do they? It could be; you assume it would be for this comment, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities that something else triggered it, right?

I did not see the actual screen where it shows you what you were banned for, I just helped my mom submit her driver's license photos and so forth, and it wasn't until a couple days later that she was presented with a screen that, by her description, was essentially identical to the twitter screen that shows you your offending tweet, and asks you to remove it in order to continue using the service. EDIT: found the pho…

Why do you need to submit driver's license photos to contest a ban?
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