The instagram BAN situation is OUT OF CONTROL (i lost 3M followers)

0:00Instagram just deleted my account with over 180,000 [music] followers. I had 600,000 followers. Over 200,000 followers. With 200,000 followers and millions of dollars in revenue on the line. No warning, no emails, nothing. How is Facebook a trillion-dollar company still allowing this happen? Over the last few weeks, I lost over 3 million [music] followers on Instagram. No warning, no reason. These accounts were banned overnight. So, of course, I turned to the internet and I noticed that I'm not the only one. Right now, thousands of creators are getting wrongfully banned on Instagram. Small businesses, real influencers, and pages that never broke a single rule. But, here's what really bothered me. It seems

0:42like everyone out there is telling you to grow your brand on Instagram, but nobody is talking about the risks of building on one platform that can ban you overnight. And when it happened to me, I searched YouTube looking for answers on how to handle it, and nobody had them. So, I figured I'd make this video myself to [music] break down what's happening, why it's happening, how you can prevent it, and exactly what

1:02to do if it happens to your account. Because I tried everything, including paying thousands of dollars to some very mysterious people, and out of all the accounts I lost, I was able to get back 1.5 [music] million followers. And in this video, I'm going to show you how, but before we get into it, you need to understand what happened to me so you can avoid making the same mistakes I

1:21did. First, some quick context on myself and what was on the line. I've been running faceless Instagram accounts since 2018. Health, travel, business, sports, whatever opportunity popped up, I would build a page around it. I look at these accounts like pieces of digital real estate. I build them, I monetize them, sometimes you can sell them. In fact, I've sold pages for multiple six figures. Recently, one of the biggest opportunities I found on Instagram were these AI influencers. Pages like this have gotten millions of followers in a very short time span. A few of the pages that I owned before they went down were

1:55Omar Wiseman with 1.2 million followers. He was literally having conversations with Shaquille O'Neal, which is just crazy. Richard Hale, who had 350,000 followers in about 6 weeks. [music] And Ava Mendez, who grew to 50,000 followers in about 3 weeks. Those were just my AI influencer pages, but I also own many faceless pages, which I've been building for years. Each of these pages is a piece of digital real estate and a real business. Some we monetize through brand deals, others we monetize through products. So, when they started

2:24disappearing, obviously, I was confused. It started with the AI accounts. One morning, I woke up to a notification saying we've disabled your account. There was no warning, no strike, and [music] no email showing which rule was broken. Then another page went down, then another. Now, at first, I thought the rational thought, which was, "Okay, Meta is just against AI influencer pages." But when I looked online, I noticed that hundreds of personal brands, business accounts, and regular faceless pages were also going down at the same time. Friends of mine started texting me saying they lost their accounts, and some of them lost over 20 different Instagram accounts. And then

2:58it got worse for me. I lost this account, which literally [music] just promotes nice viral messages. And then I lost one of my bigger accounts, ReputeForge, which has 1.3 million followers. Now, I want to be clear that on those accounts, we have never gone into the gray area or violated any community guidelines. And that was kind of the moment that I realized this wasn't about something that I did. Now, don't worry, I was able to get some of these accounts back, and I'm going to share how later in this video. But I want you to see some of the other people and pages that have gone down. This is a

3:29very prominent guy in the e-comm space. All these people lost years of their life and the blood, sweat, and tears that they put into building their accounts. And so I asked myself, "Why is Meta taking down accounts without giving any reason?" Now, I've spent weeks researching this video, and I have three theories. Theory one was that Instagram is purging AI content accounts. And honestly, this was my first instinct, and it kind of made sense. Instagram doesn't want their platform flooded by

3:55these AI influencers. I understand that. My AI influencers like Omar Waisman and Richard Hale were pulling in sane view counts. These were new, people hadn't seen them before and I kind of realized that it could be a problem down the line. But here's why this is the least probable theory. First, my other pages that went down were not AI influencer accounts. Second, I'm not the only victim. Small businesses, real personal brands and human influencers and people who had never touched AI in their life were also getting suspended in the same wave. And third, I like to think that Instagram would have made an official announcement that they were not allowing

4:29this kind of content on their platform. And just a side note, it also makes no sense because other AI influencers like these who are much bigger than my accounts were are perfectly fine and have never had an issue. So, theory one, the AI purge makes no sense. My second theory was mass fake reports. I'd heard rumors that groups of mass hackers and scammers were basically reporting getting it suspended and then basically demanding you pay a ransom to get it back. Now, this is kind of real in specific scenarios. It's been happening to influencers like this for ages. But here's the thing, I don't think it's possible that this is what caused these

5:03mass ban waves. There are so many people on the internet complaining about their Instagram going down over the last few weeks that it would just be physically impossible for this many people to be reporting this many things without meta finding a solution. So, theory two is also very unlikely. And that brings us to theory three, which is the one that I believe is actually happening. And it's honestly scarier than the sabotage theory because there's really no villain that you can fight. Theory three is that meta replaced its human moderators with AI. And it looks like that AI detection protocol is misfiring at scale. And technically, this isn't really a theory

5:37anymore. Internal meta documents obtained by NPR revealed the company plan to automate up to 90% of its risk assessments. This is work that used to be done by humans, but Meta has a recently publicly said that it's leaning into AI to enforce content moderation. This comes with reports to replace around half of human moderation reviews and human involvement dropping by more

5:58than 90% [music] in some categories. Remember my first theory that Instagram was hunting AI content? Well, turns out it's the exact opposite. Instagram isn't hunting AI, Instagram is becoming the AI. And now it seems to be malfunctioning. And once you understand the machine, my entire story and maybe yours suddenly makes sense. The AI scans your content and flags it for some

6:20random community guidelines violations. Sometimes these categories are so severe that you'd never dream of touching them. [music] Often for things that your account never actually did with no human ever actually looking at it. So, your account gets suspended with no reason given because apparently a machine doesn't really owe you an explanation. And then you see this message. So, you decide to click appeal and who reviews your appeal? Well, it's the same automated system that banned your

6:46account in the first [music] place. That's why a lot of the people who have clicked appeal actually come back with it being rejected in just a few minutes because apparently no human being ever even [music] looked at it. And if we just look at the timeline, this ban wave exploded right as this new AI rollout scaled up. In fact, it got so bad that Meta actually publicly admitted a technical error was mass suspending Facebook groups. There were people petitioning with signatures, people pursuing legal action, and that wave is

7:13still going on. Hey guys, quick note, this video is sponsored by Opus Clip and their brand new tool AI Producer, which I've been messing with all week. You basically just drop in your footage and then it edits it, adds captions, adds motion graphics, B-roll, all the stuff that you're watching right now. Basically expediting the process so that your content gets smarter and gets better results faster. [music] I'm actually going to be putting this to the test against a real human editor to see which one is cheaper, faster, and more effective. So, make sure you subscribe if you want to see who wins, but anyways, back to [music] the video. Now,

7:45to be fair, the AI is also catching real garbage. Spam networks, scams, fake engagement, even guys like Cristiano Ronaldo lost millions of followers overnight. But, the problem is this detection system is also shredding years of people's blood, sweat, and tears that they've put into this platform. Completely compliant accounts, small businesses, and years of work deleted by a machine that still struggles with context. So, some of you are probably wondering, well, how can I go about getting my account back? Well, lucky for you, I tested just about every way possible, and I'm about to share what worked and what didn't, so you can do the same. The first way that you can get

8:22your account back is to go ahead and click the appeal button. Now, for some reason, this seems to work for some people, and for some people it doesn't. For myself, it did not work on any of my accounts [music] initially, and I ended up on this page that basically said that my account is permanently disabled. And this was when I discovered the underground market of getting your account back. There's basically this underground group of people who claim

8:43that they can get your account back. Some say they have legal processes. They don't exactly explain how it works. It's all very mysterious, and they charge thousands of dollars with no real clear guarantee. Now, I tested this, and I was able to get one of my accounts back that had 350,000 followers. I paid some random guy on the internet, who I didn't even know his name, thousands of dollars, and a few days later, my account came back. I could log in,

9:08everything was there, and then boom. Within a few hours, that account that I just got back was disabled again. Now, again, to be fair in this journalistic approach here, I do have friends who have recovered their accounts using this method. Their accounts were never banned again, and they used the exact same method that I did. So, technically, it can work. But, if you go this route, understand what you're buying. It's basically a coin flip that costs thousands of dollars from someone you don't know, who you can't verify, using

9:35methods that they don't fully explain. That's the underground route, but there's a better [music] one. And remember at the start of this video when I said that everyone promotes Instagram, but nobody tells you about this? The gurus who are telling you to grow on Instagram don't want to mention it because it's a terrible sales pitch for their service. Not to mention, there's no real way of getting their message out if their account was banned, which brings us [music] to the way I was actually able to get over 1.5 million followers back. [music] And it's probably simpler than you think. It all

10:02starts with one word, Meta Verified. [music] I guess that's technically two words, but whatever. Now, my account with 1.3 million followers, That's right. I had been paying over $100 a month for two years on this account. My other AI accounts did not. And it seems that that was mainly the difference between which [music] accounts survived and which accounts died. But the problem is, if your Instagram account is Meta Verified and it goes down like this, you're not even able to enter your Meta Verified portal on Instagram. But luckily, I had set up an associated Facebook business [music] page for this account. And through that Facebook business page, I was able to

10:41access my Meta Verified portal. So, [music] I requested a call with a Meta Verified rep, and I had to wait a few minutes, which was not a fun experience. But after about 15 minutes, I received the call from Meta Verified. And to my surprise, it was not an automated system, it was a real human, and she walked me through the appeal process step-by-step. Like, is is this is it common to get your account back for something like this? What are the realistic chances that I get my account

11:05back? Um, as long as your deeds go against the Meta policy and standards, then you should be able to get your account back. And sometimes, you could have made a mistake and actually maybe done something unknowingly. Yeah. Then, the system will still be able to, in some cases, give you the account back as long as you go ahead and continue not violating the policies and you just get

11:27back your account. Now, I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I was extremely nervous on this call. I knew that if the appeal process failed, it would be very unlikely that I was going to be able to get my account back. So, I was kind of sweating bullets here. But after about 20 minutes and going through the entire process, my account was restored. But I didn't stop there. I decided to test the limits of this. I then asked her to help me get my other accounts back, [music] to which she basically said, "Because those accounts are not associated with this Meta Verified business account, we're unable

11:56to help you. Your Meta Verified subscription [music] does not cover any other account other than the one that it's associated with." Meaning, if you own multiple Instagram accounts, you need to get each of them Meta Verified and set up a Facebook business page to be able to get access back door to a Meta rep. And that's my advice to you. First, get Meta Verified on every account that matters to you today. And trust me, I'm the last person that just wants to give Meta any more money than we have to. But if you don't, you're essentially risking the chance that Meta could ban your account forever. Secondly, you want to make sure

12:29that every Instagram account is connected to an associated Facebook business page. Because if and when Instagram does lock you out, that's going to be the only back door left into Meta support. And third, if you do get suspended, do not press appeal on your own. For some reason, the blind automated appeal is what ended up turning my suspensions into permanent bans. First, get a real human on the line through verified support, then let them walk you through the appeal. Now, I do also want to mention that one of my non-Meta Verified Instagram pages was also restored. For some reason, it seemed to have worked better when I

13:02uploaded a photo of my passport rather than a normal photo of my ID. Another thing that's very important when it comes to these bans is the type of ban that you received. There are copyright strikes, deception bans, integrity bans, and all [music] of these types of bans are treated differently by the Meta system. For example, it's much easier to get back an account [music] with an integrity ban than it is to get back an account with a deception ban. So, what you want to do to find out which type of van you have is to go into your Instagram account and look at this message. And my fourth piece of advice,

13:33and probably the biggest one, is never let Instagram be the only place your audience lives. You should be building an email list, a community, a YouTube channel, a TikTok account, something that Meta can't delete. So, after all of this, am I quitting Instagram? No, I'm rebuilding, and that's because I think Instagram is still one of the most powerful distribution machines on the planet. I want my digital real estate on that platform, but I'll never build an asset on that platform again without protection. One of the reasons that I'm making this video is because I'm genuinely curious if this has happened to any of you. Do me a favor and comment

14:06below if this has happened to you and your story. [music] Let's try to use the comment section of this video as a place where we can all learn from each other on different ways that we get our accounts back. Maybe some of you know things that I don't, and there might be ways that we can help each other in the comments [music] below. I'd love to blow this video up and get the attention of Meta so they actually do something about this problem. And finally, if this has happened to you, I'm so sorry. It is not a fun experience. I've gone through it a few times [music] now, and yeah, it's

14:32not something I would wish on my worst enemy. But just know that it's not over. I've seen accounts go down for months at a time and then randomly come back. So, just follow the steps I laid out in this video, and hopefully I will see you on the other side.