Imagine creating an Instagram account and spending months building your following and growing your business only for it to be banned or deleted by Instagram.
All the time, money, effort invested into building your audience, followers, and customers…gone!
This happens to Instagram users, most likely because they violated Instagram’s terms of service or community guidelines.
To avoid having this experience, we’ve listed some actions (you should avoid) that can get you banned on Instagram. Check them out.
An action ban/action block typically happens when you exceed the number of actions you should perform on Instagram within a given time frame.
For example, liking too many posts and following too many people too quickly. These could get your account blocked by Instagram.
You either receive a message to notify you that your action has been restricted, or the action just won’t work.
One good thing is that action blocks are usually temporary and you will get your account back up and running after a couple of hours or days.
When you get shadow banned, your content gets limited reach and visibility. This means it doesn’t show up in hashtags or on anyone’s feed on Instagram, unless they already follow you.
This can happen if you use broken/banned hashtags or your account is often reported by other users.
While you’re still able to perform actions on your account, shadow bans prevent your posts from appearing in the tags you use.
This is the worst one where your account gets permanently deleted from Instagram and you will no longer have access to it. When this happens, you’re almost never going to get your account back.
Bans occur when you have continually received action blocks or are in clear violation of Instagram’s terms of use.
Permanent bans often result in account deletion, ban of usernames – so you won’t be able to re-create your account.
In serious cases, Instagram will restrict your IP from accessing the Instagram website and app.
Although automation is safe when done correctly, if you don’t know what you’re doing and blindly follow automation settings on forums, it makes it easy for Instagram to detect that you’re using automation tools.
You are not allowed to create accounts through unauthorised means which include but are not limited to: using automated devices, scripts, bots, spider, crawler or scraper.
Most fake accounts on Instagram are created and managed through bots and scripts. According to Instagram’s community guidelines, buying fake followers is officially banned and is considered fraudulent.
Even if you don’t get caught, buying fake followers and engagement kills your account and damages your brand.
You are not allowed to create or submit unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications (a/k/a “spam”) to any Instagram users.
When you constantly duplicate (copying and pasting) comments and direct messages to a lot of different Instagram users, Instagram considers this as spamming and warns against this in its community guidelines.
According to Instagram’s terms of use; “You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorised purpose. You agree to comply with all laws, rules and regulations (for example, federal, state, local and provincial) applicable to your use of the Service and your Content (defined below), including but not limited to, copyright laws.”
Hence, selling products that are illegal in your location (for example, guns), can get you in trouble with Instagram.
Instagram takes posting sexual content very seriously. In its terms of use, it says; You may not post violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, hateful, infringing, pornographic, or sexual suggestive photos or other content via the service.
Another issue that Instagram takes seriously is Copyright Infringement. Make sure you post original content, and in cases where you use people’s content, be sure to take permission and give credit.
If you don’t, the content owner can report your account to Instagram and you will get banned for breaching Instagram’s copyright rules.
If it’s an Action Block, you are in luck. As already mentioned, blocks are lifted as soon as 24 hours or at times a few days.
If Instagram has permanently banned your account, it is a little tricky to get it back.
There is not much you can do besides directly contacting Instagram to lift the ban.
