Instagram is cracking down on Appeal Bots 🤖

Things are changing at Instagram - these days more than ever.

Back in February 2020, Instagram started a wide-spread experiment that involved deleting accounts that broke their Terms of Service or Terms of Use instead of just disabling them.

Affected users would be notified on their next login, that they violated the Community Guidelines and now had 30 days to export their data (everything they shared such as Photos, Comments, Your Bio) before their account would be permanently deleted from the platform. While they provide a for to appeal their decision (It's almost this one), the response is as slow and has the same decline rate for harder bans as the usual appeal, which severely limits the ability to get your account back before the deadline.z

Only the beginning?

Instagram seems to get more aggressive about how they treat ToS violations and people that try to appeal their decision to ban an offending (or sometimes just innocent people) account.

We regularly keep in touch with people who directly work near Instagram as a whole. Instagram Media Partners are the first to receive information that directly can impact their networks and accounts. From a few partners, we received worrying information that Instagram will tighten the requirements for an unban and plans to penalize repeated, automated appeals for accounts. Leading to longer unban times (nothing new here really, it's a big game of lottery), but more importantly impacting accounts and risking to lose them forever. Agents at Facebook have been instructed to review images carefully to verify their authenticity. At the same time, the filtering Algorithm/AI will sort out generated images way more effectively than it ever had.

What does that mean for you?

If you are appealing manually, things are technically the same as before. Follow the best practices, don't appeal more than once per 24hrs and you should be good to go - Manual appeals are the best way t get your account back.

If you are using any "Appeal Bot" that does automatic appeal for you, be aware of the risks. Depending on the quality of the bot, you could ruin your account forever - permanently locking it from being appealed again, manually or automatic. Shortening the intervals, generating not-so-good images, or leaving fingerprints of automation while appealing can all lead to severe issues in the future. Many services will frantically try to update or fix their automation - But we think a new saddle won't help a dead horse.

What does that mean for Recap?

Nothing. Recap was always designed and conceived as a tool that helps people get (dozens, hundreds, thousands of) accounts back while never compromising on account safety and sticking the best-practices that work. We do not lock ourselves to a specific method or technology or squeeze in features that could be potentially harmful to an account if misused. For example: setting the time-frame between appeals. Sadly, we hear of a lot of accounts that at least have been temporarily locked for quite some time because some interface allowed them to send an appeal every 3hrs - mostly to give the user a sense of control, charging a higher price for customization.

Over four years ago, we started doing Appeals and Unbans for a widespread customer base - Manually. Multiple hundreds of accounts every day, without fail. We were the firsts to code an automatic system that had the same ratio of Unbans as a human could achieve.

But clever image manipulation, algorithms, advanced mathematics, and fingerprint evasion can only bring you so far if you are trying to compete with Facebook. Hence we already started moving away from automation, when the first rumors of changes spread. We slowly reduced the number of accounts appealed by the automatic system while increasing the number of real, human (at least they look like humans 🤖) Unban Agents that manually appeal accounts. Since May 1st, we decided to pull the plug on the automatic system not to endanger any customer accounts. All appeals are now carried out by real-life humans, from filling the form, taking real pictures, and checking through the responses.

Manually appeals are currently the only way that will not endanger your account, as they are 100% Terms of Service compliant. Any form of Automation is against Facebook's and Instagram's Terms of Service.

Does it cost more?

No. No increase in pricing. Due to our pricing model, we can employ a manual workforce without compromising on quality. We don't run Recap to become rich - We are sure there are better and easier ways than trying to recover Instagram accounts. Recap is a passion project and will continue to run as long as we can help customers get their accounts back. 💖

Sadly, many other low-end competitors can't do that. They lack the experience, funds, or workforce and simply compromise on a  level we are not willing to.

Final Words

If you have doubts about your current way of appealing, hop on the live chat or leave us a message, and we will walk you through what could pose as a potential issue when you are trying to get your account back. Remember: Getting an Instagram account back is a battle without shortcuts, but a lot of pitfalls.

Stay safe and healthy!