from Hacker News

Ask HN: Wife's Instagram account was deleted – what now?

by asdojasdosadsa on 2/18/22, 4:40 PM with 24 comments

• by MikeAshley178 on 2/18/22, 9:25 PM

  They don't care. Honestly they are fighting a massive bot/spam problem. A good chance 90% of your wifes "followers" were bots. Explain this to her and go live your best life.

• by Graffur on 2/18/22, 7:49 PM

  I feel sorry for your wife. I know a lot of people put a lot of time into their Instagram accounts and sometimes it may contain the only version of photos/stories that exist. It's easily dismiss-able by posters here who don't care about IG but I bet your wife feels pretty bad.

  Unfortunately I can't help. Thanks for posting though.. it is a lesson for all of us. Backups and alternatives are important!

• by axg11 on 2/18/22, 5:13 PM

  I don't know how important this is to you. Assuming it's very important, I would do the following:

  - Find Instagram PMs on Twitter, DM as many as possible

  - DM Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (from another account)

  - Repeat the above on LinkedIn

  It's an aggressive list of actions, but if getting the account back was really important to me I would try it.

• by hereforphone on 2/18/22, 6:48 PM

  As others have said, consider deleting the account. It's a waste of time, and no one but your family legitimately cares about your kids, vacation, wacky moments, etc. Vanity is a vice and you'll be better off abandoning this one.

• by joshstrange on 2/18/22, 5:27 PM

  So this was her personal account? Not a business account?

  My sister's business account was hacked (phished probably) and was contacted by the scammer asking for money to get the account back. IG's support is practically non-existent and their automated tools don't help at all if the scammer changes the username/email. She got it back a few days later by going through her state's government. Apparently they have contacts at FB/IG/etc to escalate cases affecting businesses based in their state. She got put in contact with this rep through a friend of a friend so I don't know how easy it is to make use of this "resource". You'd think it would be easy for IG to notice that an account being logged in from a new location, username changed, password changed, and email changed is probably a victim but their systems did nothing.

  If it's a personal account your best bet is to make noise online, have a friend that works at IG, or do what the other comment here says about contacting IG PMs on Twitter which is a sad state of affairs. Whatever you do DO NOT pay anyone online promising to get the account back. There are plenty of people with "testimonials" of people they have helped, don't fall for it.

• by subbz on 2/18/22, 6:03 PM

  Take it as a good opportunity to ditch Instagram and Meta forever! ;)

• by ews on 2/18/22, 6:22 PM

  Got mine closed for no reason at all (didn't post a single picture in months, but supposedly my last one was against their TOS).

  Got into the mugshot bot loop for weeks and weeks. Absolutely nothing.

  Reached out to Facebook Legal. Nothing.

  Ended up ditching Facebook and Instagram. Won't look back.

• by GoodbyeMrChips on 2/18/22, 9:46 PM

  > Are there any Metamates

  I can't be the only one who laughed at this!

• by Gravyness on 2/18/22, 6:18 PM

  Same thing happened to me 2 months ago, appealed, got reply, took photo proving identity, "nothing we can do", so I gave up, might not be your best course of action but I didn't want the stress of fighting it so created a new one and added my friends again. I then created a backup of my friends list just in case it happens again.

• by byteski on 2/18/22, 7:28 PM

  that’s why you should create a personal website with photos for your wife (if it’s not just a few photos but seriously deal or even business). great example of why social medias are garbage and ppl have to look at indie web idea.

• by k__ on 2/18/22, 7:09 PM

  Reminds me of the time I got banned from Tinder because I uploaded a meme.

  Haven't used it since then, but I also didn't miss it.

  I have to admit, I would be sad if I lose my Twitter account.

• by giantg2 on 2/18/22, 10:33 PM

  This is an extremely biased take based on my own opinion, but... maybe it's better to just pretend they did you guys a favor and stop using IG?

• by charlieyu1 on 2/18/22, 5:27 PM

  I have heard so people got Instagram accounts deleted and complaining on reddit. According to them, basically they tried everything and nothing worked.

• by merlinscholz on 2/18/22, 7:22 PM

  Since when is this site a tech support forum?

• by softwarebeware on 2/18/22, 5:59 PM

  Have you tried reset password?

• by axiosgunnar on 2/18/22, 6:53 PM

  Stop. Depending. On. FAAANG.