How do i lock my instagram account
“Your Account Has Been Temporarily Locked”
For various reasons, Instagram can temporarily lock your account to protect users and the platform and encourage the best experience. If you received the “Your account has been temporarily locked” notice, this article explains what might have prompted the message and how to unlock it as quickly as possible.
You’ll also find examples of specific Instagram activity that gets deemed suspicious, which generally leads to a locked account. Let’s get started!
Why Was My Instagram Account Locked?
Instagram will temporarily lock your account if they believe you have breached any of their user policies. The lock can happen even if you have nothing to do with the violation. Their bots and automated systems detect such activity without human intervention, which means your account can also get locked without violating any terms due to a technical issue with the system.
Here are the typical activities that cause Instagram to issue an account lock:
1.
Instagram looks for actions performed too quickly per hour and in 24-hour periods. The following acts performed at an unnaturally fast rate are considered “bot activity” and trigger a temporary account lock:
Following and Unfollowing Users in Bulk
Typical Instagram conduct includes “following” someone and having them “follow” you straight back. To exploit this practice, one could “follow” hundreds of people at once, then once they’ve been “followed,” the person “unfollows” them.
Instagram will deem this bot behavior as abuse to the system and its users.
Liking and Un-Liking Pictures Too Quick
Rapidly liking and unliking images/posts too quickly and in bulk triggers the potential detection of bot behavior.
Scrolling through your feed and ‘liking” a couple of photos or so at an average pace is matched to typical human behavior. However, “liking” or “un-linking” a hundred pictures in one brief session, for example, often occurs when using a bot program.
Commenting on Posts Too Quickly
The more comments you leave on people’s posts, the more engagement you get and, eventually, the more followers. Super-fast commenting on numerous posts implies artificial actions to the Instagram algorithm, leading to bot detection.
Posting the Same Comment Multiple Times
Not only would copying/pasting a comment in bulk reduce the value of a conversation, but it also is not something that a user who is genuinely engaging with posts would do. This action typically occurs when using bots, so Instagram’s automated systems detect it as bot use and lock your account.
2. Use of Third-Party Apps
Using some third-party applications on Instagram breaches their Terms of Use. Not all apps are banned; there is an approval process for some apps to have access.
Regardless, third-party apps that help automate actions are prohibited and easily detected by Instagram. Bots work against a great user experience, so any account suspected of using them will get locked.
3. Phished Account Credentials
Hackers can obtain your sign-in details using a fraudulent website. If you accidentally submitted your Instagram credentials by signing into a login screen that looked like Instagram, you may have given away your login details.
Since your account is compromised and hackers can do what they want, whatever they did has triggered a red flag with Instagram, and the platform responded with an account lock.
How To Unlock a Locked Instagram Account
To unlock your account when seeing the “Your Account Has Been Temporarily Locked” message at login, you need to submit the My Instagram account has been deactivated form:
- Go to the “My Instagram account has been deactivated” form or conduct a search for “My Instagram account has been deactivated” in a search engine, and choose the Facebook result.
- Complete the form, then enter the “email address” tied to the Instagram account you’re trying to unlock.
- Explain that your account got blocked by mistake and that you believe you haven’t violated the user guidelines.
- Once you’ve completed the form, click “Send.”
- You’ll eventually receive a reply. Instagram requests a photo of you holding up a written piece of paper with the code they’ve sent you. The picture must be 100% original and clear, showing your face next to the code—no Photoshop editing. Instagram is stringent and may reject the photo if they believe it isn’t you.
- There is a waiting period after you’ve sent the photo. If approved, you’ll receive a confirmation from Instagram that your account got unlocked. Approval times can take anywhere between a few days to a few weeks.
In closing, an Instagram account is automatically locked whenever Instagram believes a user has breached its community guidelines, whether it is legit or not. Bots and hackers are typical reasons for an Instagram account to get locked.
To create the best user experience, Instagram prohibits using most third-party apps and blocks any account displaying bot-like behavior or one that exhibits irregular activity.
Luckily, unlocking your account is usually one form away. By completing the form and proving you are the human owner of the profile, Instagram will recover your account as quickly as possible. Of course, there is potential for denial based on human action. Bots can’t handle this part of the recovery process.
Instagram Locked FAQs
How long does an Instagram ban last?
The length of a temporary ban depends on your number of past bans and the causes of those bans. A typical duration could last from a few hours on the lighter side to 24-48 hours for repeated infractions.
If you receive subsequent bans, Instagram’s ban duration may become longer. Therefore, do your best to avoid bot-like behavior so your account doesn’t get flagged.
If you receive the “Your Account Has Been Temporarily Locked” message when trying to sign in, complete and submit a “My Instagram account has been deactivated form” to reinstate your account as soon as possible.
Does Instagram ban IP addresses?
Some platforms take banning very seriously. They don’t just ban the account; they want to ban the user permanently. The only way to permanently block a user is to restrict their device’s IP Address. Instagram has not issued official statements, but many users have reported receiving an IP ban.
If Instagram deems you violated their Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, the company will ban your device and your account.
What do I do if my appeal gets denied?
If you followed the steps above and Instagram didn’t restore your account, you can process the appeal again. While not confirmed, there are some theories that a second or third appeal can work because another reviewer looked into your case.
Also, remember that repeatedly submitting content that Instagram asks for can lead to denial or a more extended ban due to suspicions of hacking, just like numerous login attempts. After all, a hacker is desperate to confiscate your account and doesn’t care what happens during the process.
They’ll just move on to another profile.
If I get banned, can I create a new account?
In most cases, you can create another Instagram profile. However, beware that creating a new account with the same (or similar username) can result in an immediate ban.
How to protect your privacy on Instagram
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Keep your stories and feed posts locked down
By Jacob Kastrenakes / @jake_k
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
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The Verge Guide to Instagram
My Instagram profile probably reveals more personal details about me than any other social network page. As a result, I started to get creeped out after I realized just how many people were following me I didn’t actually know.
Locking down your privacy on Instagram can be as simple as setting your profile to “private.
” But you can get a lot more granular than that, and there is a range of other protections you can put in place. You can keep your account public but make it a little more protected, or even add stricter protections than simply flipping the private profile switch gives you.
If you really want to keep your account safe, here’s what you can do.
Set your account to private
Setting your account to private is the simplest thing you can do to lock down your profile. It means that, going forward, no one can see your photos or stories unless you approve them.
Once your account is private, new people who visit your profile will only see your name and profile image. From there, they can request to follow you, and you have to confirm their request before they can see your photos or stories.
To set your account to private:
- Go to Instagram’s settings menu. It’s hidden away on your profile page behind the hamburger button in the top-right corner. That will open a side menu with several choices; you can access your settings from the cog that appears at the very bottom.
- From there, go to “Privacy” > “Account Privacy” and activate the “Private Account” setting.
One important caveat: anyone who already follows you at the time you change your account to private will still be following you. That means if there’s anyone you want to deny access to, you have to remove them from your followers list.
To remove someone who’s following you:
- Go to your profile, and tap on your follower count
- Scroll through your list, and tap the big “Remove” button beside the name of anyone you want to get rid of
Protect your stories
Instagram lets you limit who sees your stories (the reel of images that disappear after 24 hours) and stop people from sharing them even further.
To hide your story from specific people:
- Go to “Settings” > “Privacy” > “Story”
- Choose “Hide Story From.” It’ll open a list of your followers. Tap the circle beside their name to cut off access.
You can also prevent people from sharing your story:
- Go to that same page (“Settings” > “Privacy” > “Story”).
Scroll down to the bottom where there’s a section labeled “Sharing.” - You’ll see an option that says “Allow Sharing.” Turning this off will prevent people from messaging your stories to others.
- You can also turn off “Allow Resharing to Stories” to prevent people from adding your posts to their stories.
- To stop your stories from being shared to Facebook, disable “Share Your Story to Facebook.” This means they’ll only post to Instagram.
Finally, you can use Instagram’s Close Friends feature to limit the reach of your stories to specific people.
- To set who’s in that group of people, go to “Settings” > “Privacy” > “Story”
- Tap under Close Friends and start adding people. People won’t be notified when they’re added (or removed) from this group.
Block people from seeing your feed
When it comes to protecting the photos and videos posted to your feed, it’s much more of an all-or-nothing scenario than it is with stories.
If you don’t want to go private, you can still block individual users:
- To block someone, you first have to go to their account. On their profile page, tap the three-dotted menu in the upper-right corner.
- Click on “Block”
Note: you can also restrict people from this menu. If you restrict them, they can still see your content, but their comments will only appear to you, and they won’t be able to see when you’re online.
Make yourself less visible
There are a few things you can do to make yourself a little bit harder to find (and give out less information about yourself in the process).
First, you can stop sending your contacts to Instagram. You might have given Instagram access to your contacts initially to help find your friends when signing up, but it means that Instagram knows who’s in your phone book. To turn it off:
- Go to “Settings” > “Account” > “Contacts Syncing”
- Disable “Connect Contacts”
You can also stop Instagram from suggesting your account to others.
This happens when someone follows a new account: Instagram will then display accounts it believes are “similar,” which you could be grouped into. You can’t change this using your mobile app. To turn this off:
- Sign into Instagram’s website, and go to your profile
- Select the “Edit Profile” button
- Uncheck the very last option, “Similar Account Suggestions”
Finally, it’s worth checking to see whether any of your Instagram posts come up in a Google search. By default, Instagram doesn’t let Google find your photos, but if you ever signed into a third-party web viewer (and you might have in the years before Instagram was available on the web), it’s possible that site is scraping your profile and posting it for all to see.
If one or more of your posts does come up in your search, the first step to getting rid of it is to cut off third-party apps’ access to your Instagram account. You can do that on the mobile app:
- Go to “Settings” > “Security” > “Apps and Websites” > “Active”
- Remove any apps you aren’t using anymore
Protect what people see about you
You can drill down even further in limiting what in your account is visible to other people.
One big thing you can do is turn off your activity status so people can’t see when you’re online. (Be aware that, if you disable this, you won’t be able to see when other people are online either.)
- Go to “Settings” > “Privacy” > “Activity Status”
- Disable “Show Activity Status”
You might also want to review tagged photos before they’re posted to your profile. If you have a public account, reviewing every tag can stop spammers from filling up your profile. And if you have a private account, this can stop your friends from sticking an unflattering picture on your profile. To do this:
- Go to “Settings” > “Privacy” > “Tags”
- Enable “Manually Approve Tags”
Stop saving your posts and stories
You may not actually want to save the photos and videos you post to Instagram, especially your disappearing stories. There are a couple of things you can do to stop that.
To stop your stories from being saved:
- Go to “Settings” > “Privacy” > “Story”
- Turn off two settings.
The first is “Save to Camera Roll” (on iOS) or “Save to Gallery” (on Android), which saves your stories to your phone. The second is “Save to Archive,” and turning that off stops Instagram from hanging onto your stories for you to view later after they’ve disappeared.
If you also want to keep your feed posts inside of Instagram:
- Go to “Settings” > “Account” > “Original Posts”
- Disable all three options (Save Original Posts, Save Posted Photos, and Save Posted Videos)
This will prevent the posts from being stored locally on your phone, but it also means that your only copy will be on Instagram.
Get rid of personalized ads
Instagram ads are based on websites you visit and apps you use. If you want to put a stop to this, it’s a little bit trickier. You actually have to hop over to Facebook, which owns Instagram.
To disable ad personalization, you first need to go to Facebook’s ad settings.
- On mobile, in the Facebook app, tap the hamburger menu in the top right corner, then choose “Settings & Privacy” > “Settings”> “Ad Preferences” > “Ad Settings”
- On the web, just click here to go to the “Your Ad Preferences” page, and then click on “Ad settings” to reveal your options.
- You’ll want to turn off the top two options: “Ads based on data from partners” and “Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere.” This will stop Facebook from targeting you based on information it obtains outside of Instagram.
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How to delete an account on Instagram: instructions
Sometimes it is useful to take a break from social networks, but self-discipline allows this only to a few.
Then deleting the profile comes to the rescue. We explain how to delete from Instagram permanently or temporarily, saving data
Since March 21, 2022, the social networks Facebook and Instagram have been banned in Russia by a court decision, and the Meta Platforms holding company that owns them has been recognized as an extremist organization and is also banned.
Some users notice that they devote too much time to managing their Instagram account to the detriment of work and personal affairs. Even the owner of Instagram, Meta, admitted in internal documents that its social networks have a negative impact on sleep, work, parenting, work productivity and personal life of approximately 12.5% of users. And scientists from the University of British Columbia found that users' own lives begin to seem insufficiently bright and interesting compared to what they see on Instagram. nine0003
Meanwhile, until the spring of 2022, the social network was consistently in the top 10 in terms of downloads in Russia and in the world.
The international agency We Are Social estimated that in 2021 Instagram ranked fourth in our country in terms of the number of users (61.2% of Russian Internet users go there), and in total 67.8% of the Russian population (99 million people) use social networks. The average Russian spends 3 hours a day outside of work at the monitor or with a smartphone.
In November 2021, Instagram began testing the Take a Break feature. It will allow users to escape from the continuous viewing of the feed. In the settings, it will be possible to set reminders for breaks, for example, 10, 20 or 30 minutes. After that, the application will issue a warning about the need to rest. However, this feature has been opened to a limited number of users so far. nine0003
For now, everyone has the only alternative - to give up Instagram for a while or for good.
How to permanently delete an Instagram account
This option should be chosen when the profile is definitely no longer useful: for example, if we are talking about the account of a company that has closed.
Before deleting a profile, Instagram will offer to save data from it. To do this, you need to send a download request. After that, an email will be sent to your email within 48 hours with a link where you can download photos and videos. You can also request a copy of your data through the Instagram app for Android and iPhone. To do this, open the menu in the profile, go to the "Settings" - "Security" section and select the "Download data" item. Next, you will need to enter your email address and account password. nine0003
Download request from Instagram
Even after deleting the profile, it will be visible on the social network for another 30 days. During this time, the user can change his mind and restore the account. If within a month the owner of the profile has never logged into the system, then the account is permanently deleted.
In the web version
To delete a profile using a computer, you need to perform several steps:
- go to the social network site and click on the "Help" button in the lower right corner; nine0032
- go to the "Help Center" and select the line "Delete your account" in the left menu;
- follow the link suggested in the article;
- specify the reason for deleting the profile;
- confirm the action by entering a password.
From Smartphone
To delete your Instagram profile using your phone, you need to take more steps:
- log in to your profile in the app and click on "Settings"; nine0032
- in the menu that appears, select the line "Help" and go to the "Help Center";
- on the page that opens, select the item "Manage your account";
- in the search bar enter the query "Delete profile";
- go to the article "How to delete your Instagram account";
- follow the link in the article;
- specify the reason for deleting the account and enter the page password. nine0032
How to temporarily delete an Instagram account
The user can also stop using Instagram for any period and then restore the page. However, you can do this no more than once a week. A temporarily deleted profile is not visible to other users of the social network. To restore it, you just need to log into the application.
In the web version
To temporarily deactivate your profile using a computer, you must perform the following steps:
- go to the social network site under your account;
- click on the profile photo and select "Settings" in the menu that opens;
- at the bottom of the page, click on the link "Temporarily disable my account";
- on the page that opens, indicate the reason for the temporary disconnection and enter the account password.
From the phone
As in the case of the "permanent" deletion, temporary blocking of Instagram will require more steps:
- go to your profile;
- go to the "Settings" section and select the "Help" item;
- in the menu that appears, click on the line "Help Center";
- on the support page, open the "Manage your account" item;
- in the search bar, enter "Temporarily disable";
- go to the article "How to delete your Instagram account";
- click on the link "How to temporarily disable your account" and find the article "Instagram.
com website from a mobile browser"; nine0032 - click on the link in the first paragraph of the instruction and go to the mobile browser;
- on the main page of the account, click on the "Edit profile" button;
- select the link "Temporarily disable my account" at the bottom of the page.
Is it possible to delete a blocked Instagram account
To delete your account, you need to know your username and password. A forgotten password can be reset using an email address, phone number, or Facebook account. If the user does not have access to the email address specified during registration, and his Instagram and Facebook accounts are not linked, then the support service will not be able to provide access to the account. nine0003
In the event that an Instagram account has been blocked by the social network itself, its owner will see a corresponding message when logging in. He can appeal this decision. To do this, you need to open the app, enter your username and password, and then follow the instructions on the screen.
However, if the user or other person who has the account password deletes it, then Instagram will not be able to restore the profile. In this case, you can create a new account with the same email address, but you probably won't be able to use the old name. nine0003
How to temporarily delete (disable) your Instagram account
Social networks have already become such an integral part of our lives that from time to time you frankly start to get tired of them. Do you want to take a break from Instagram? Such a desire is quite understandable. But instead of completely deleting the app or your profile, try simply temporarily deactivating your Instagram account. It is likely that in a month you will want to use the services of this service again. And, having entered it, you will see all your records in the same place - as if there was no downtime. nine0003
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♥ BY TOPIC: How to unfollow a person on Instagram so that they don’t find out (so as not to offend).
How to temporarily disable your Instagram account
Temporarily disabling your Instagram account removes your profile from the social network for the period of time you need to take a break from the service. The link to your Instagram profile will become invalid, users will not be able to find you in the search, and they will also not be able to contact you. But these features will be restored after the account is reactivated. nine0003
You can temporarily deactivate your Instagram account whether it is a personal account or a business account.
Oddly enough, you won't be able to disable your account from the Instagram app on iPhone or Android. Instead, you will need to use the Instagram website.
1. Open the Instagram website on your computer or smartphone browser and log in with the account you want to disable. nine0003
2. Go to the main profile page and select " Edit profile " there.
Alternatively, you can go directly to this link to go directly to the profile editing screen.
3. In this section, scroll down and click on the option " Temporarily disable my account ".
4. Instagram will ask you why your account was deactivated. You can select options from the drop down menu. If they do not suit you, or you do not want to specify a specific reason, then select the option " Other .”
After the choice is made, you will need to enter your Instagram password in a special field.
5. Now you will again need to click on the blue button " Temporarily block account " at the bottom of the page. Once again, Instagram will ask you if you want to continue. It remains only to press the button " Yes " in the pop-up window.
This will disable your Instagram account. On the smartphone, the application will exit the service. To see the result of what you have done, you can try searching for yourself by username on Instagram.
