How to check spam messages on instagram

How to Find and Use It

By Maggie McCullough

Published May 25, 2022

Instagram's Hidden Requests folder filters certain messages, hiding them from your main inbox.

The messaging feature on Instagram is a large part of the app experience, and Instagram is constantly tweaking it to make it as user-friendly as possible.

You may have noticed your message requests folder before when you open your Instagram messages. But there is another hidden folder buried even deeper, titled "Hidden Requests". Here is what you should know about these hidden messages.

What Are Hidden Requests?

Hidden Requests is a folder of message requests other Instagram users have sent to you that Instagram has flagged as offensive or spam. Instagram has their own list of offensive words, phrases, and emojis that will land a message in the hidden folder.

However, you can also go into your privacy settings on Instagram and add your own list of words, phrases, and emojis that you would like to get filtered into the hidden folder.

You can choose to completely avoid this folder. However, some people may want to check it in case a message has been incorrectly flagged.

Where Is the Hidden Requests Folder?

Follow these few steps to find your hidden requests on Instagram:

Navigate to your messaging tab on Instagram.
Tap on (#) Requests on the right of the screen (This will appear in blue font).
Tap on Hidden Requests.
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What if a Message Ends up in Hidden Requests by Mistake?

Instagram also gives you the option to Delete or Accept a message. If a mistake has been made and the message is something you did not want in your hidden requests folder, you can choose to accept the message, which will allow you to reply.

How to Add More Words, Phrases, and Emojis to the Hidden Requests List

If you are noticing some offensive messages still making it into your regular message requests folder, you can add your own personalized list of filter words to send them to the hidden requests folder in the future.

Follow these steps:

Navigate to your profile page on Instagram.
Tap the three lines in the top-right corner.
Tap on Settings.
Tap on Privacy.
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Tap on Hidden words.
Tap on Manage List
Add each word, phrase, and emoji you would like to get flagged and filtered into your hidden requests folder.
Tap Add when you're done.
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How to Block Users Sending Inappropriate Messages

Instagram makes it relatively simple to block users who appear in your hidden requests folder. If you would like to block someone, click on the message they sent you, and tap Block in the bottom-left corner.

When you tap the Block button, you will be given the option to ignore, block, or report the user. If the message is harmful you may want to report the message in addition to blocking the user.

How to Report Messages in Your Hidden Requests Folder

If a message comes across as harmful, offensive, seems like spam, or you just don't like it, Instagram gives you the option to report the message. Follow these steps to report a hidden request:

Tap on the message conversation you would like to report.
Tap the Block button in the bottom-left corner.
Tap Report.
Select the reason for reporting the message.
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You can then choose to block or restrict the Instagram user if you have not already done so. Instagram will also allow you to choose to block any account that person makes in the future.

Why Should You Care About Hidden Requests?

The hidden requests folder on Instagram is a great tool for filtering out harmful, offensive, and spam messages that are sent to you on the app.

But you might want to check this folder from time to time to see what you have received, block or report anything harmful or offensive, or find messages that may have been sorted incorrectly into the hidden requests folder.

Receiving Instagram Spam Messages? How to Spot and Stop Them

With so many Instagram accounts out there, some users are exposed to spam messages. If you have a public account, then the rate of receiving such messages can be quite significant. Initially, such messages go unnoticed, but this can be rather frustrating as your account grows.

But it's not always easy to tell what's spam and what's genuine, In this article, we will discuss tips for spotting spam messages on Instagram and how to stop them.

The following list features methods to check spam messages on Instagram and recognize them.

1. Poor Profile Quality

The primary way to recognize anyone on Instagram is through their profile picture. Genuine people use their own photos to get noticed.

On the other hand, the display picture of spam accounts is either extremely blurry or unrecognisable—and sometimes they use generic stock images.

In most cases, these spam accounts don't bother to upload a decent profile picture to make things seem realistic. Most of these accounts don’t even have an Instagram bio. They also may have few posts or a series of duplicate posts on their profile.

2. They're Trying to Sell You Something

In most cases, spam accounts exist only to promote a specific product. The people using those accounts work for companies and sell their products/services on a commission basis. It might also be a bot from some website as an attempt to increase sales.

So, next time when you see long messages ending with “Try this product now and get 50% off on the entire stock” appear randomly in your Instagram DM request, consider them spam.

Some people may click the links to see the offer, but it is an unsafe practice. Always click links from trusted sources. If you suspect a hack, check and clear your Instagram log-in activity instantly.

3. Requests for Donations

Donating to charity is appreciated, but unfortunately, some people try to take advantage of other people's generosity to scam them out of money.

You may receive an anonymous message asking for money for a specific cause—and some people get send a reasonable sum or buy products without any authentication that the charity is legitimate. We recommend donating to only reputable charities so that you know your money is going towards benefiting the relevant cause and not straight into the pockets of a random person on Instagram.

You do not deserve to waste your hard-earned money on a con sitting on the other side of the screen. You can also check the authenticity of the account using Instagram's About This Account feature.

4. Nudity and Explicit Material

Instagram is used by a global audience, and according to its Community Guidelines, Instagram only accepts appropriate content for every age group.

You might get your account banned on Instagram by sharing explicit content. However, nudity and vulgar content sometimes reach your DMs.

Spammy sexbots are real, and they might disturb you by sending pornographic content without consent or permission. If someone sends an image to your message requests folder with no context, rather don't open it.

5. Links to External Sites

Some people try to send links to random people on Instagram to boost their web traffic or sometimes send people to scam sites.

Don’t contribute to becoming a temporary member of some random website that you don't even know about. At best, you're rewarding the spammer with web traffic. At worse, you're compromising your security.

6. A Low Follower/Engagement Ratio

A spam account will focus on gaining followers rather than engagement. It means that their numbers might look big, but there would be hardly any views and likes when you open their uploaded content.

These accounts follow people to gain followers in return and then unfollow after a while. Most spam accounts also do not have quality material on their accounts.

How to Stop Instagram Spam Messages

If you are sick of spam messages, here is a list of actions that you can take to avoid them...

1. Change Your Message Privacy

The first and most effective step to take is changing the privacy settings for messages. These settings restrict who can send you messages.

Here’s how:

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Tap the three horizontal bars on the top right of your Instagram profile to open a new menu.
Select Settings.
From the menu, choose Privacy and scroll until you see Messages.
You can decide whose messages can appear in your inbox in the Messages menu. Change the privacy settings accordingly.

2. Change Your Account Privacy

Public accounts receive a lot more spam than private ones. Making your account private can put you at ease by reducing the number of spam in your messages and comments.

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To make your Instagram account private:

Tap the three horizontal bars on the top right of your Instagram profile.
Select Settings to open a range of options.
From the menu, choose Privacy.
Tap Private Account to enable it.

3. Report and Block the Account

An account that has spammed once can do that again. The best practice is to block the account and report it to Instagram. You can do that by following these few steps:

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Open the profile you wish to report. You can do that by visiting their profile or through the message they sent you.
If you visit their profile, select the three horizontal dots in the top-right corner once the profile is fully loaded. In your hidden requests message folder, Instagram lets you reject the message or block the contact.
Select Block the user and new accounts they may create.
To report an account, simply tap on Report and select your reason. If it violates the Instagram community guidelines, it will be taken off immediately after review.

Making Instagram More Enjoyable by Avoiding Spam

Spam messages for public accounts are a real headache. They can invade your Instagram account and bother you with unnecessary messages, dangerous links, and even non-consensual sexual material.

There are different ways to recognize spam messages, make your profile private, and change the message settings accordingly. We hope this article helped give you the material you needed to spot and stop receiving spam messages on Instagram.

How to remove spam on Instagram

Spam and bots among Instagram followers is a common problem. Many people underestimate it, but it significantly slows down promotion, lowering the positions of publications in the news feed. Let's talk in more detail about how bots and spam get into the number of subscribers and how to get rid of them.

Where do spam and bots come from on Instagram?

There are three main causes of spam and bots:

● buying subscribers; nine0003 ● automatic promotion;
● Abandoning accounts by users.
Consider each of them.

Buying followers

A rapid increase in the number of followers to a large number gives a short-term improvement in the ranking of the posts of an Instagram account. Therefore, some bloggers and business page owners buy them.

However, in the long run, such a purchase does not bring anything good. Usually they sell accounts specially created for this. After they get into the number of subscribers, they will not show any activity, becoming a "dead weight". nine0004

Buying followers is one of the sources of spam

Automatic promotion

If you need to reach a really large audience on Instagram (at least a few thousand people), automatic promotion is indispensable. It is simply impossible to manually collect information about users and perform all the necessary actions in relation to them that are designed to persuade them to subscribe.

However, automatic promotion has a downside. The algorithms of most online services are not able to distinguish "live" users from bots and abandoned accounts, and cannot identify spammers. Also, people who do not speak the language of the target audience often fall into the number of subscribers, whose presence is also undesirable. nine0004

Account abandonment

Another reason why subscribers can get spam is when users abandon their accounts. Often people stop running their Instagram page for whatever reason. As a result, such users do not show any activity in your account and turn into unnecessary ballast.

Why spam and bots need to be fought on Instagram

Spam and bots on Instagram directly affect:

● audience behavior;
● publication ranking.

Audience behavior

If there are at least two or three bots or spammers among the subscribers who send advertising messages or nonsense, the outflow of the audience is guaranteed. People will start unsubscribing. After all, few people will like it when, instead of real communication in comments or Direct, you have to read spam.

Inactive users also influence audience behavior. The first thing that comes to mind when a person sees a large number of inactive subscribers is that they were bought. This dramatically undermines the credibility of the account owner and can also cause mass unsubscribing. nine0004

Ranking

Ranking is affected not by spammers and bots, but primarily by inactive subscribers. The positions of publications of an account with a lot of them are omitted by Instagram algorithms in the news feed. As a result, less and less other users can see them, and the influx of new subscribers is greatly weakened. If, at the same time, old subscribers begin to unsubscribe from the account, then all the efforts and funds invested in promotion will be completely in vain.

The abundance of inactive followers will lower the positions of posts in the feed

How to check Instagram for bots?

There are two ways to check your Instagram account for spam and bots:

● using standard social network statistics;
● through specialized online services.

Statistics

Checking with standard statistics reveals whether there are inactive users among subscribers. You can understand that they really exist if half or even a smaller part of the subscribers perform any actions in relation to publications. nine0004

You can also learn about bots using statistics. Usually their algorithms are activated at a strictly defined time. Sometimes it does not coincide with the time of activity of the main part of the audience. Based on this discrepancy, they conclude that there are bots among subscribers.

Online services

Another way to check is through specialized online services. One of them is Spam Guard. Unlike checking with standard Instagram statistics tools, it provides the user with a list of specific unwanted followers, which includes bots, spammers, and profiles that have not shown any activity for a long time. nine0004

Main page of the service

How to remove bots on Instagram?

If an Instagram account has many followers, it is physically impossible to remove bots and spam manually. Here again, online services come to the rescue to deal with them. For example, the already mentioned Spam Guard.

It performs a thorough analysis of the Instagram page, based on which it generates a list of inactive accounts, bots, spammers and users who show suspicious activity. If a "live" subscriber got into it by mistake, it can be added to the exceptions - in this case it will not be deleted. nine0004

A distinctive feature of the service is that using the service you can not only clear your account of unwanted subscribers, but also prevent their reappearance. Protection can be configured independently by indicating who you do not want to see among subscribers. The following categories of accounts are available:

● bots;
● foreigners;
● non-reciprocal subscriptions;
● Inactive profiles. nine0004

You can connect several Instagram accounts to Spam Guard at once, which greatly simplifies your work. Using the service is absolutely safe - the algorithms of the social network do not react to it in any way. This ensures the complete absence of the possibility of blocking while cleaning your account.

Summing up

Spam and bots often appear among Instagram account subscribers. This happens for various reasons, but most often it is caused by buying subscribers, automatic promotion, and abandoning users of their pages. Many do not fight spam and bots. This is mistake. They affect both the ranking of publications in the news feed and the behavior of other subscribers. If the audience of the account is large, it is impossible to clean it from spam and bots manually. This is where specialized online services come to the rescue. Spam Guard is an example of one of them. nine0004

How do I view messages received via Instagram Direct?

Help Center

Instagram features

Direct messaging

You can view and manage Direct messages on the Instagram app for Android and iPhone, and the Instagram Lite app for Android.

How can I view a received Direct message?

Instagram app for Android and iPhone

Tap the or icon in the top right corner of the feed. nine0004

Click on the desired conversation.

instagram.com in a mobile browser

instagram.com in a desktop browser

Instagram Lite app for Android

Why can't I see a Direct message in my chat list?

If the message is sent by the person you follow, it will appear in the chat list.

If a message is sent by someone you don't follow, it will appear in your inbox as a message request. To accept or decline a message request:

Instagram app for Android

Tap the or icon in the top right corner of the feed.

Select Requests.

Press and hold the message.

Select Delete or Accept. You can click Remove All at the bottom of the screen to reject all requests at once.

Instagram app for iPhone