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Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

thesun.co.uk

41–50 of 68 posts

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

#41
I deleted Instagram from my phone a few days ago and I am so happy with my decision. You know, there is no need to share pictures of my food with a random collection of mostly strangers and no need for me to look at pictures of people's filtered lives or endlessly scroll through that TikTok rip off they added.

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

#42

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 seems like a somewhat impractical argument - each layer of third party reliance is increasing the probability of an event like this. Surely removing some of those layers makes the problem better? I don't think parent post is claiming that it's a perfect solution - those so rarely exist.

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

#44

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.

>I have had a domain name stolen by a registrar and I have had web hostings suspended.

Well, that sounds odd. I feel like having a domain name "stolen" when you have an up-to-date payment for a domain would be grounds for litigation, unlike an instagram account getting suspended. Likewise with web-hosting: If you pay for it, I feel there would be more avenues for arbitration.

Of course nothing is 100%, but the abstraction certainly helps.

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

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

this is a very good question!

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

#46
Same crud before every US election affecting multiple services. I wonder if they he private communication channel will ever become public, or maybe they just ban people after they banned them on one platform. Some ideas just don't survive debate.

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

#47
post #29

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

My read is a typo mislabeled a ton of accounts as sketchy and the verification flow is extremely backlogged. Should not have been deployed passed a small percent when the ratio of flagged accounts was so high, but so it goes.

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

#48
post #37

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 li…

as much as I agree with your sentiment, I think this isn’t the case here. my friend came to me for tech support with this exact problem today and it isn’t presenting like overzealous banning.

there’s no “your account has been suspended” email. the account appears as deleted to other users, throws a connection error when you try to log in on mobile and just hangs when you log in through a browser. this isn’t normal suspension behaviour

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

#49
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But they're not. The linked post from instagram support on twitter says they're fixing things. Much ado about nothing.

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

#50

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.

Here is how almost every conversation I've had with non-tech people about using any alternative web platform.

me: have you ever tried X? it's an alternative for Y

them: isn't that for racists or drug dealers or something?

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