Without Instagram, forever

After an article about the background to the Huawei pressure campaign from the winter of 2018 was published, I decided to share it via a Story on my Instagram. Shortly after I got a black mark. The Story was removed for violating the terms — specifically cybersecurity policy!

I didn't know yet that PageNotFound has an ongoing dispute with Meta and that linking to their platform from Meta services is a problem… I sent some kind of appeal, but I already knew nothing would come of it. Time passed until one morning… Your account has been blocked! I can of course appeal…

So I appealed, discovered that the migration to Microsoft Authenticator hadn't gone well and MFA wasn't working. I filled in everything required and waited… Your account has been deactivated , you cannot appeal (and we won't tell you why). You can request a download of your data, here. As it turned out later, I can't even download my own data — I end up in a loop, the link doesn't work. Given that we have GDPR I have no idea, but Meta is violating it comprehensively here.

So I made a backup account and after a few hours I ended up in the same place. Fine — different phone, different email, different phone number. That account lasted about three days. Then it ended exactly the same way. So I'm done with Instagram. Evidently I did something the platform has a problem with. I have no idea what, but it doesn't matter. Life without likes, stories, and reels will be better.