Meta Verified Nightmare.

I want to share my story, 3 days ago suddenly I woke up and my account on @instagram was disabled, no warning just disabled, I clicked an option to appeal, and I figured was an error or somebody trying to hack my account, a few minutes later I receive an automatic response from @meta saying my appeal was denied therefore I couldn’t appeal anymore..

My account was permanently and officially suspended…

These were my two available options:

Download my information

Log out of Instagram.

At this point, there is nothing anything you can do, the AI response specifically says, the decision was reviewed and therefore “MY ACCOUNT SEEM TO HAVE BROKEN THE GUIDELINES” Which at the end of this blog post you’ll see they won’t either mention this is what happened or tell you what exactly happened, the whole time you are being gaslighted being told you broke the rules it’s your fault, constantly over and over.

So here is the part I don’t understand when I appealed, this means that a human operator decided to verify my claim that I did not break any rules therefore my account should have been reinstated, yet this is far from the truth, as it was obviously at this point not disabled but permanently suspended…

If a human operator was able to check the issue, why did they continue disabling my account? This is where the big issue is in whatever chain of command or pipeline they have, more on this later.
The only two options at this point were to download my information and log out of Instagram.

Please take a look at this, as it’s very important they admit, that a human operator reviewed my account and for whatever reason they suspended it, they decided to do so, of course without explaining to you why, and without an option to appeal, since you already ran out of appeals, remember this all happened within literary 15 minutes!! I spent 7 years of my life building my Instagram to be taken away in less than 15 minutes, this is how scary this all is..

The endless customer service loop begins. 

Before I continue let me make something very clear, at this stage, since you already ran out of appeals, there is nothing you can do, if you message Instagram/Facebook via the common submission form, you will receive an automatic email telling you that your submission was received and or that the decision was made and there is nothing you can do.

Now what about those of us who paid for Instagram verification, the main feature that attracted me to do the verification was the option to speak to a human operator, I could hopefully try to get some support in case my account was hacked and or lost somehow, I am the creator of an upcoming Video Game, therefore, my accounts have always been under attacked by malicious hackers and or trolls, therefore this option to have backup security with a real human operator was the main reason why I joined the verification program, both on Instagram and Facebook. But here is where it gets tricky.

As I showed you before, once you have an issue with Instagram YOU CANNOT CONTACT META SUPPORT, there are only two options, download your information as it will be permanently deleted, it says on the email, and or
LOG OUT, which means leave and don’t come back. So now, please tell me HOW or WHY am I paying for META VERIFIED if the option to communicate with a human operator is suddenly disabled!!! I am not kidding!!
If your account is hacked, disabled, suspended, or whatever, there is ABSOLUTELY NO OPTION whatsoever to contact Verified Support!!

Since my account was permanently disabled there was nothing else I could do, my heart stopped, I spent 7 years building my brand, building a portfolio, creating networking and connections, and Instagram eventually our main platform where independent artists and creators conduct business I spent thousands of dollars over the years in the advertisement, I’ve created dozens of Instagram filters for @creators with millions of impressions, for years we creators have helped Built the reputation of Instagram as the place to showcase photography, film, 3D artists, illustrator’s you name it, we rely our entire business and portfolio on this platform for one day to wake up and being told they don’t know you and told to screw yourself by an automated generated response!

Please check the reasons why they suspended my account:

1. Creating an account that looks like a celebrity? Wait, are you serious? I only have one account and I am not a celebrity or trying to impersonate one
2. Using a photo of someone famous to deceive people? I am a photographer and I only take and post my photos, this makes no sense.
3. Creating content that pretends to speak for a public figure or politician, basically at this point, is getting even more ridiculous.

Remember that the whole time you are being accused of committing this behavior, gaslighting you to the point where you start to think wait did I do any of that? It makes no sense but none of it makes sense I have never done, or I could relate to anything I am being accused, therefore the most logical reason is that it is a glitch, somebody screwed up, or my account was reported by bots or trolls, and the human operator that confirmed this didn’t care at all to even properly check.

Meanwhile, for the past few days, there was no way to communicate with my clients, my business associates, my friends, and my family, every day my account was down, was affecting my business and relationships with my clients and friends, and community, that I built over the years, meanwhile communication with meta team, nothing but generated answers, no real support.
Mount Fuji: Nature’s Majestic Canvas

Basically at this stage, I spoke to them on the phone, seems it’s their new way to “Leave no trace” as whatever they write could potentially get them in trouble which can be used against them.
I spoke to them on the phone, and they listened to my story, I felt at one point like they cared, and they promised me they would do their best to resolve this, they said maximum it would take 24 hours to get resolved.

Meanwhile, I received messages from friends worrying, business associates shocked, and at the same time, the same day I had a VIP photoshoot with a respected client which I couldn’t even communicate since I was locked out of my account and could not communicate with my client, imagine the type of stress I was dealing with, my customer probably thinking I scammed them or something since my account was blocked.

I waited a full day, and I submitted another ticket via FACEBOOK VERIFIED Customer support,

By this time already 3 days passed, and I went from being in a state of shock to being in a state of just hopelessness, I felt I would be trapped in an automated-generated support with no real intention of helping or assisting me whatsoever.
I was told if I paid for meta verification I would be able to communicate with a human person so they could help me resolve my issue, and partially it was true, Meta Verified or Meta Pro as they called it in their emails, is a “Call Center somewhere in a third World country, by their names and accents is India, and Latin America, this Meta support is nothing more than glorified call center where they aren’t real engineers, they arent real technical support trained individuals, they are phone operators that are ready to take your complaint and “Pass it along” to a real technical engineer or somebody with account access.

By this stage everything was clear, Meta Verified support was not going to do anything in their power to help me, it was not up to them, all they could do was pass the message to somebody else who could take my case, Meta a social media conglomerate with billions of active users, is when it hits you, with billions of people I am not the only one that is probably having issues and or their account being disabled, but I am supposed to be not just anyone because “I am meta verified right? ”  As naive as it sounds, you do think that in this type of case where an account has been taken down by the AI system and you paid for support in the event something like this happens, they got your back but that is far from the truth.

During my second day, I received about 3 messages in my email from the Meta Pro team, they all assured me “Hey we are working on it” Don’t worry, our team is working on it as we speak, talk soon.
Not much consolation when you are running a business on Instagram and your clients and your followers are thinking the worst tho.

By this time I am in limbo, there isn’t any news, they can’t seem to figure it out or they just telling me they are working on it when in reality I am one more case stashed in somebody’s email account or desk.

Around this time I started getting around 30 messages to my business account pages on Facebook, literary dozens of messages that were phishing attempts to steal my account, by this time I thought, this isn’t a coincidence, I am probably being attacked by bots and or hackers, maybe this is why my account was disabled, I’ve read online that hackers were verifying Instagram accounts, once they had blue check mark they will change it to my profile photo and submit a claim and report my account, the system will automatically disable the account and therefore this was the easiest way for trolls and or hackers or political groups to target big accounts, celebrities and or individuals that were targets of this scams.

Of course, by this time I had already so many theories and was suspicious of why this was all happening and why to me. I compiled a bunch of evidence of these attacks and sent it to meta support replying to the emails they sent me, this is where things got even worse, as a business owner that operates in their platform, I want to think I am “business partner” as they are my advertisement agent basically, I’ve spent thousands of dollars in advertisement over the years, more of that later, anyways by this time I start to receive automatically generated emails from them telling me, “They can’t support me by this channel” and directing me to a link with information on what to do in case my account gets disabled.

This is the link they sent me.

Here we go again, they told me they couldn’t help me anymore and to check the page for details that could assist me, non of the information on this link solves my problem or tells me what the real issue is to my account, non of it, why would they do that? Why would they forward me this email template without consideration of my situation?

What’s even more frustrating is, that whenever I click on any of the links my Instagram will open, but since my account is disabled and there are only two options, download your data or log out, this information is not relevant and it creates a dead end, are you telling me they didn’t know this? a company as large as Meta has the resources to figure this out so why am I being told generic responses that lead to no solutions?

Here is my issue, I am not here to try to frame Meta as an evil company, or as a company that doesn’t care about its “customers” and I said customers because we paid for Meta verified because I spent more than 1.5 million yen in an advertisement for Facebook pages and Instagram for my video game and also for my photography account, I want to think that although I am one of the billions of people I can count with meta business support to handle my business operations and my business advertisement, but that’s not the case tho, you are in the back of the line along with everyone else.

I heard of agencies that work directly with Meta support, for example, famous artists and political organizations that have a personalized support channel to communicate with Meta in case their accounts get hacked or any issue arises, so as a small independent company that spent over 1.5 million yen in advertisement why we don’t have the security as this private agencies do to protect their hard-working business?

By this stage I am reading horror stories on Reddit and everywhere online of people who completely lost their accounts, let me just say this isn’t the first time this happened to me, this is the 3rd time this happened, the first time in 2020, the second time in April of 2023 before meta verified and now again, so I can’t imagine the hell that other people have to go through!!

This is an endemic problem and issue that countless people are going through, i know because I’ve had my account disabled 3 times before and every time they tell me was their issue, but they don’t go into details as to why this happened.

By this the 4th day, I almost already lost hope and I was already thinking of ways to recover the entire life portfolio I built carefully over the past 7 years, I felt I was sold a lie to spend money to reach new audiences, for the end to just being completely ignored and put away like I didn’t exist.

This was a big eye-opener, my account was disabled and therefore suspended without any reason with no way to appeal within 15 minutes, i spent 4 days trying to communicate with the meta pro team, with only empty responses, AI generated, or templates that says “we are working on it” you’ll hear from us soon.

By the 4th day, I lost it, I made a new report, and I was told by the phone representative “ TO PLEASE STOP MAKING NEW REPORTS”  or else it would be reported as SPAM and they wouldn’t support me, my jaw dropped, because basically at this stage, any email I sent to them or reply to them I would automatically receive an auto-generated ai response saying, sorry we can’t support you anymore, your case is closed, check this link for details, the link is the one I uploaded above, with no real information to solve my issue, so wait are you seriously? what I am supposed to do at this point?

The representative on the phone said let me get this fixed, we hung up, and I don’t know if he had anything to do with it, or my Facebook post asking any of my Bay Area friends who work at Facebook to help me or the countless messages I sent them and my persistence, but suddenly I received this email.

So what exactly just happened, remember my account was flagged and a human operator confirmed I did break the rules, yet now they are saying I didn’t? but they can’t confirm or accept the fact that I did not do anything that would break the guidelines.

And just like that, I am back on Instagram, it was 4 days of pure hell, thinking the worst, i learned that I depended too much on this platform to operate my business, that building community and promoting the Instagram brand at the end of the day you aren’t a creator they support but an asset number, no matter how much money you spent advertising, no matter if you are verified, no matter if I spent years developing Instagram filters that reached millions of people, at the end of the day i realized if wasn’t lucky enough to pay for Facebook verification ( 30USD ) between Facebook and Instagram PER MONTH! then I would have probably lost my account.

Now every time I open Instagram I feel like one day this might happen again, and what assurance do I have? What backup options do we have? I am not a hater, on contrary I love Instagram, I’ve been using it as a professional and as a personal account since it was created, i hope Meta reads this and understands that I am not here complaining for no reason, I am here writing this because I love the app, I love the connections it has built for me, I love that it has helped my business grow and has helped my brand get established, this is why all this matter to me, this is why it’s so personal because we creators, especially photographers chose you, the least we ask is to support us back when we need you.

Conclusion:

I posted my experience in threads, i was surprised it wasn’t throttled since whoever owns the system can control it, we should be able to voice our opinions and frustrations, after this situation, my Instagram engagement dropped, I checked my account insights, and shows, I lost 42k followers and then I gained 42k followers this probably means that when my account was disabled your followers get removed and added, I am sure this also affects my instance in the platform, and who will it fix it? nobody they don’t care.. This was an opener we rely on our entire business and portfolios on these platforms, if we speak against it or speak the truth the algorithm
Will bury me, I don’t feel safe anymore and I don’t feel photographers and Creative artists get respected, protected, and supported by Meta!