On Friday, I woke up to a notice from Instagram saying they had removed one of my posts for violating community standards. Apparently, their AI misread my post about Ozempic prices in Kuwait versus other countries and thought I was “selling prescription weight-loss injections.”
I was given the option to appeal the decision, which I did. A couple of minutes later, I received a message saying my appeal was rejected. I’m guessing the appeal was also reviewed by AI, because I was then given the option to submit the post to an “Oversight Board” for review. I did that, and I’m now waiting for a response.
The issue is that my account now has some restrictions. Most of them don’t really affect me, except for one important one, I can no longer mark my ads on Instagram as a “Paid Partnership.”
I always mark paid posts as paid partnerships and also add my own “Promoted” badge so there’s no confusion to what content is paid for and what isn’t. Yesterday, while posting an ad, I found out about this new limitation, so I ended up added the hashtag #paidpartnership at the bottom. I think that’s a fair compromise for now until Instagram sorts this out.
It’s pretty scary knowing that Instagram’s AI can misinterpret a post and automatically limit your account, or even shut it down. I understand using AI to flag content for a human to review, but I didn’t realize it had this much power. A lot of people rely on Instagram for their livelihood, me included. In this case I was lucky AI didn’t suspend my account or something and just restricted some features. In my previous job Instagram suspended one of our restaurants accounts because AI thought we were pretending to be a pharmacy which went by the same name. Took us forever to get it back online.
It’s one of the reasons I prefer my blog here, I’m in control and if something happens my hosting provider Wavai are a WhatsApp message away. And it’s happened before where the blog went down or I messed something up, I’d just contact them and they sort out the issue for me. When I contacted Instagram support and spoke to a real person about my issue, they couldn’t do anything about this since they told me they didn’t have the authority and I needed to wait for the Oversight Board’s decision.
Hopefully the Oversight Board are real people who will see the mistake and get my account restrictions removed.
2 replies on “Violating Instagram Community Standards”
In Egypt its 25.93 KD
Meanwhile in Australia there is a social media ban on anyone below 16 years of age. Imagine yesterday having access to the social media services and waking up today to find that you cannot access it at all. The issue with that is the youth have grown up with technology and need social media but they cannot have access to it anymore.