So, I woke up today at 7am, opened Instagram, and suddenly saw the news: I have been suspended, and I have 180 days left to appeal before my account is permanently banned.
I felt hopeless and thought, “Well, I guess I deserved it,” because I had made non-illegal mistakes before that got my old account banned. I also bypassed that ban by logging into an already existing account on my laptop and then using it on my mobile. I kept the activity very unsuspicious but today I thought I had finally been caught.
Even though I have changed as a person and my new account is very non-toxic, I could not believe I was being flagged for doing literally nothing.
Here is what happened:
I first appealed, and the app asked me to send a photo of mine, I did that, closed and reopened the app after a few minutes and they requested for a video verification. I completed it successfully, but when I reopened the app, the appeal had not gone through, and it asked me to send the video verification again. I assumed it was my mistake and repeated the process three times in total and it just didn't work for some reason, no amount of reuploading video verification helped.
Then I decided to try from Google Chrome. Surprisingly, it asked for ID verification, which I, then completed. And after refreshing the page, it said that I had submitted an appeal successfully and that it would be reviewed, both on the browser and in the app.
A few hours later, they asked me to resend the ID because I had intentionally blocked an important detail. I then resubmitted it without any filter, and it was approved. The appeal was successfully completed.
One key detail is to take a clear photograph of your ID without hiding or cropping anything, so it does not appear as if you used a random image from Google. You can show the ends of the card and the background indicating your palm holding the ID, which makes it realistic.
After that, I waited a few hours and voila! I do not know how, but it worked. They sent me the mail and I was able to open instagram without any restriction, I felt such a relief that I got a chance to redeem myself 🥺
In the end, I believe I was flagged by AI due to a coincidental link to my past, but I am grateful that my account was manually reviewed and confirmed to have no history of ban evasion or toxic behavior.
TL;DR: Don't do it the shady way, if you actually want your account back, you'll have to compensate your identity and actually do it multiple times in multiple ways and follow everything as they say.