Instaban

July 12, 2024 5:12 AM

Instagram thinks I'm scraping and might ban me. I'm not scraping, and I can't work out why Instagram thinks I am. What to do?

I see the scraping warning challenge screen on almost every visit on desktop. I'm seeing it more often on mobile too. Links are breaking and pages are "temporarily available".

- my account is private and I don't have any sketchy follows or followers
- my password is very long and random and unique and was last changed a few weeks ago
- no one else has access to my account. The only active sessions Instagram lists are Chrome on my laptop and the app on my phone
- I have 2FA set up on the Meta accounts centre which handles my Insta account
- no 3rd-party apps or websites are connected to my account. There's an expired IFTTT connection from 2020
- the only browser extensions which Chrome allows access to instagram.com are Bitwarden and uBlock Origin. I've disabled uBlock on instagram.com within the extension itself (unfortunately I don't think you can set extensions to be allowed by default but denied per-site at the Chrome level). Chrome DevTools doesn't report any blocked network resources.
- I access the internet through home wifi, phone data, phone wifi hotspot when I'm out and about, and (less commonly) office and corporate wifi networks. I rarely use train and airport wifi. I have a VPN but haven't used it for a while.
- I use NextDNS to block ads and trackers at the DNS level but it doesn't report any blocked domains when I load instagram.com, and again Chrome DevTools indicates no blocked resources

What might be causing this and how do I fix it?

posted by Klipspringer to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Best answer: my account is private and I don't have any sketchy follows or followers

Any weirdos with a grudge?
posted by phunniemee at 5:33 AM on July 12

Seems like you should change your password, regardless of how strong the current one is and what is causing Instagram's system to flag your account.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:44 AM on July 12 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Password last changed 20 June — changed again now, just in case.
posted by Klipspringer at 5:53 AM on July 12 [1 favorite]

Are you unfollowing people? If you unfollow too many they’ll pretend to think you’re a bot.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 5:54 AM on July 12

oh sorry, I had a brain fart and thought you were talking about instacart. Like maybe you were scraping grocery prices or something. Obviously you can't call instagram.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:23 AM on July 12 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I have no idea what the problem is, but I've been seeing that exact same notice on Instagram for the past several days, and now on Threads as well, for no reason I can think of. It's quite annoying.
posted by Umami Dearest at 6:35 AM on July 12 [2 favorites]

Also no help but I got a suspension notice on Facebook yesterday that then went away without me taking any additional action. Maybe Meta is having some weird issue.
posted by jeoc at 6:51 AM on July 12

Best answer: I went through a period last year where Facebook was putting me on some kind of timeouts. I couldn't post photos to albums for a while via the regular website, but posting through the mobile website worked fine. The message I got implied that I was basically posting too fast when I was editing captions to photos (hey, I type fast).

The messages never really made sense, and they went away after about a week. I figured one of their internal algorithms went sour, and somebody kicked it back into working. Nobody responded to any support communications, of course.
posted by gimonca at 6:57 AM on July 12

Best answer: I got messages like this at one point - I feel like I was doing a lot of looking at profiles that I wasn't actually following that led to this - not consuming content via the discover tab, but instead using the search function to go and find users who I remembered on a regular basis. I had maybe 40-50 users who I would routinely visit like that and that seemed to be too many.
posted by openhearted at 7:10 AM on July 12

Best answer: Instagram are always inscrutable so it's impossible to know exactly what is going on, but one thing about uBlock is that whitelisting a website is NOT the same as running without an ad-blocker. The advertising ecosystem is so complex with multiple domains all talking to one another, the only way to get consistent behaviour is by blocking Everything or Nothing (by un-installing the ad-blocker completely).
posted by Lanark at 8:49 AM on July 12

So this question made me remember that I meant to set up an Instagram account, because I've never had one and have a slight addiction to youtube, so it could be fun.

I created an account, put in the code they send you to prove that you're you - and was immediately informed my account was suspended due to activity that was against the terms of the service.

Literally had done nothing but create an account and confirm my identity using their code.

I was offered a chance to appeal, which I am doing. But yeah, I think those saying there's something whack going on with Instagram right now have it.
posted by invincible summer at 4:37 PM on July 12

Best answer: I'm getting this too. My personal theory is that it is related to the fact that I sometimes use my work laptop to access Instagram, so I'm going through a VPN, so it's getting suspicious that a bunch of different accounts are all accessing Instagram from the same IP address.
posted by dudekiller at 12:47 AM on July 13

Response by poster: For anyone else afflicted — what appears to have resolved this for me, for the moment at least, is stopping using a particular guest wifi network that was oddly configured.
posted by Klipspringer at 6:13 AM on August 4