I have an instagram account that I don’t use. No uploads, no real profile, I never like or save anything etc. I sometimes use it to log in if I need to view something that’s locked behind sign in.

Earlier this week I got a notice my account was banned for trying to circumvent meta’s rules and other bans. They said this was serious as anyone caught trying to do this would have a lifetime ban across all accounts. If unappealed it would be considered permanent and irreversible.

Well, getting locked entirely off Meta’s platform sounds like it could have annoying side effects in the future (access to Facebook, WhatsApp, whatever else they eventually acquire) so I went through the annoyance of appealing it. I had to give all the info I previously chose to not give them. Email, phone, even a photograph of my face so they could confirm identity. With that they reversed the ban within seconds.

It’s stupid how much power they hold for your online social presence and how irresponsibly they wield it.

Par for the course. Meta won't let me create an Instagram account. I did close out my Facebook account in 2016 and I created a new one to go with my Meta Quest 3 last year.

It's not like I've never run a webcrawler or automation against a web site (like this one) but never against a Meta property and I can't imagine I've made the slightest amount of trouble for Meta unless you count canceling my account in 2016.

If I could log into Instagram I could create a ticket but tickets made in Facebook just go nowhere.

The warning notification/ appeal processes from tech platforms are a joke; the fact that their process lacks any specificity whatsoever is plain consumer abuse. I'm surprised consumer protection agencies haven't made a bigger issue of this.

Check their terms of service I almost bet that includes a binding arbitration clause for disputes. Send a notice that you would like to avail yourself of binding arbitration in this matter. Depending on how bad you want it back hire a lawyer to do this in a harass them. Generally when you start forcing them to adhere to their own terms of service they back down and reconsider.

But really what this goes to show is this was never your YouTube account to begin with. As we come up on our presidential elections they all hem and haw about idiotic things that will never change but ask yourself which candidates talk about this kind of nonsense that companies do. Which candidates campaign for the protections of normal people using these services that have become so large that they are the underpinning of many of the things in our society nowadays.

It would be interesting to know what your account was actually doing if it was doing things you weren't aware of. If YouTube's accusations against your account were accurate, which sounds slightly likely considering you didn't even accurately know what you had uploaded to your own account so possibly maybe your account wasn't as secure as you thought and it could have been doing the things that they accused it of.

But remember it's just an account you had. Separate yourself from the account. Don't take it personally because it's not personal.

Check the login history on your Google account itself and make sure that no locations are logged in or have logged in in the past.

Because, yeah if you weren't aware that your account was posting comments on things that were spam or deceptive then it totally makes sense to close that YouTube account. You might not have been doing anything (yourself actively bad) but also, yeah you weren't doing anything (yourself proactively good).

But yeah let me express my sympathy and empathy to this situation. I had a similar thing happen last year with my twitch account. I got banned due to machine learning auto moderation for an out-of-context chat message that out of context yes it makes sense that I was banned but in context no it does not make sense that I was banned. But The situation ended up fixing itself because twitches moderation policy is that they can't pull favors and unbanned people for a minimum of 90 days. And there was a perfect storm where 90 days after my ban it happened to be my birthday and TwitchCon was going on and I'm friendly with a twitch ambassador so I think they brought something up and it was my birthday and it was 90 days past and with zero fanfare my account was allowed to log in again. But those 90 days was mental torture and hell.

At least you weren't doing what I've heard and seen a lot of people who get banned from YouTube were doing which is the strangest thing to my head, using YouTube the way you are supposed to be using Google photos... By just blasting YouTube with public and or unlisted personal family videos... Which is a highly unadvisable thing to do.

It definitely would be interesting know details. SOmeone using my account for spam was first thing I suspected as well, but at least the Google login history does not show anything out of ordinary, all my devices from locations I know with timestamps that I can match with something I did. Also the account has strong password with 2FA enabled, which I assume should give some amount of security.

Now how will you watch ads?

But the thing was that I wasn't even watching their ads as I have paid for the Premium for a long time...