The article has been updated. First published April 28, 2015
Instagram bans accounts for cheating and other actions prohibited by the rules. Clean, legal accounts have never been banned for using our service. However, we recommend that you read the following guidelines. But it should be noted right away that there are no penalties for publishing a photo on Instagram from a computer.
Insta bans accounts using an algorithm known only to Instagram. Based on our experience, we have compiled a list of some criteria by which Instagram calculates suspicious accounts and bans them.
The main reasons for being banned on Instagram
A sharp rise in popularity
The most important criterion is the sharply increased popularity of the account. Does Instagram ban for cheating? Definitely yes. For example, buying bots and subscribers multiplies the risk of being banned.
Comment: This is an unjustified risk – the fake value of the account will not do any real benefit. Admired subscribers are not interested in your offers, and statistics will show poor user activity.
In addition, the algorithm studies the reaction of subscribers to the post. If there are a lot of subscribers, and within two hours after the publication there are few likes and comments, the conclusion is that users are not interested in it. Later, Instagram will hide the post from the feed of real followers.
Frequent change of IP address
If the account was used from more than one IP at different times, then there will be no ban – just confirm on Instagram that it was you.
But if you connect your account to several services in one day, each of which has its own IP, then the chance of being banned increases many times over.
Frequent device changes
Multiple change of the device to which the account is linked looks suspicious for the social network.
All services and tools for working with Instagram are different devices in terms of the algorithm, only virtual ones. If you constantly change the device, Insta bans, then disassembles.
Account origin
Accounts bought in so-called “trash heaps” often get banned. These are accounts registered from a device or IP address from which many other profiles were issued. Such accounts usually do not live long.
We recommend registering accounts on your own and observe the limitation on the number of registrations on one device and IP address. The exact limitation is not known, but it can be reliably said that the more account registrations on one device and IP address, the higher the chance of being banned.
Each suspicious action is a bell for the ban algorithm and they are summed up. But if you take sufficient time intervals between suspicious actions, then the risk gradually decreases. A lot of this is mentioned in Instagram’s terms of service.
We do not recommend connecting accounts to SMMplanner immediately after using other services and tools. This is an additional suspicious action that can be the final straw for the ban algorithm.
Clean, legal accounts have never been banned for using our service. But if MF or ML was used on your account, then we recommend that you let this account “lie down” for a while, before connecting to our or any other service.
If Insta bans a CLEAN account for connecting to our service (which has never happened in practice), you can restore it. To do this, open the app, enter your username and password, and then follow the onscreen instructions. You did not break the rules, and the change of IP could be caused by a trip or moving.
Analysis of Instagram rules
The importance of a rule can be assessed by the number of its mentions in the rules of a given social network:
- Intellectual property (other people’s photos) – 12 mentions.
- Comments (spam) – 4 mentions.
- Likes (masliking) – 1 mention.
- Subscriptions (masfollowing) – 1 mentions.
Violation of intellectual property rights was explained by 99% of bans in those days when it was possible to write to Instagram technical support. This rule applies to the posting of pictures from the Internet, other people’s photos and images.
Why Instagram bans: other reasons
There are other ways to get banned on Instagram. Don’t use them 🙂
Other people’s photos and people in the photo
The publication of materials copied on the Internet, the publication of other people is prohibited. Accounts that commit such a violation may be disabled at any time.
Comment: This is the reason for 99% of blocking cases.
Photo of documents
Ban accounts for posting on your page an e-mail address, social security number, credit card information, passport data, driver’s license number, personal mobile number that belong to you personally or to another person.
Comment: A photo of any of these documents and items can lead to your page being blocked.
Comments
This ban category includes the use of the self-promotion service, repeated comments, comments with commercial spam, such as website URLs and discount codes.
Comment: This is a rough list of what instagram calls itself spam. You should be wary of “repeated comments” and repetitive actions in general.
Create accounts
Accounts should not be created using automated devices, crawlers, bots, scripts, scrapers, web spiders, or other unauthorized means.
Comment: all accounts not registered from the phone are permanently banned.
One image from multiple accounts
Don’t post the same image from multiple accounts at the same time.
Comment: for this it is easy to get banned from all accounts at once, even though everyone will have their own IP – upload it to social. network you all at the same time.
Post multiple images per minute
You shouldn’t post a dozen posts at the same time in one account. An approximate criterion is no more than one or two posts per minute. Exceeding this limit, you risk getting frozen or banned. Although our service allows you to schedule multiple posts for the same time, do not overuse.
Comment: in our experience, 5 publications within one minute lead to sad consequences (the account was from the drain).
At the same time, we have a case when a user with a clean, legal account and unique content (photographer) published 15-20 images at the same time for a long period and there was no ban.
This once again confirms that violations tend to accumulate and sanctions are imposed on accounts of different quality in different ways.
Spam # hashtags
Instagram may freeze indexing of your posts by hashtags if you publish several images in a row with the same set of hashtags. It manifests itself like this: pictures begin to be published without a signature at all or with inoperative hashtags.
Comment: in our experience, freezing occurs for a period of no more than a day, or the hashtags for a specific image are simply turned off. Switching off under a specific image was observed in most cases and it was enough just to change the set of hashtags to make them work again.
Brand Pages
If you create a branded page for an organization or any other legal entity, Instagram requires you to prove eligibility for this activity.
Comment: Instagram’s rules state that you can only post to your personal account, the creation of corporate accounts and publications in them are carried out only with the consent of Instagram. We have rarely seen the application of this rule in practice. But after blocking the page, as soon as the user confirmed the right to promote this brand, Instagram removed the ban.
Summing up, we note that the majority of users violate Instagram rules in one way or another. Especially those who promote commercial pages, use mass following, massliking and publish pictures from the Internet. Promote your account using legal, proven and effective methods. You can learn about them from the course Instagram Sales: Secrets of Professionals from SMM.school.
Insta bans most often not for one specific action (unless, of course, this is another user’s complaint against you), but for their combination.
The good news is that the likelihood of being banned decreases if you stop doing the actions prohibited by the rules. Therefore, in dangerous situations, we advise you to give your account time to “lie down”.
Register now in SMMplanner and schedule posts on Instagram and Instagram Stories.