Comment by easyThrowaway
3 days ago
As I wrote on a past comment:
The real customer service for any Meta-related service is their legal department.
I've worked for a marketing firm whose clients (High End Fashion Industry in EU) were very prone to straddling the line regarding the Instagram ToS. If an account was disabled by some automatic trigger the lawyers would write/fax Meta asking for the account restoration, usually with no fuss on their side.
As you may guess, it wasn't exactly cheap. No idea if a lawyer may do something like that for you inexpensively or pro-bono given the nature of your app.
Haha, I believe I know what kind of ToS violations you are talking about. Multiple LVMH (and subsidiaries) accounts doing live streaming on Instagram with unauthorized tools. We had multiple instances of account being blocked automatically and being unbanned within an hour because somebody at LVMH put pressure on them.
...All while the Paris (or Milan? Can't remember for sure) Fashion Week was live. It was a stupidly nerve breaking job, I'm glad I'm very, very far away from it.
Shoutout to The Level Group guys (https://www.thelevelgroup.com) who kept the infra live and running during all that madness.
IME this also only works if you're a significant spender. Otherwise you get form responses.
Won't lie, my experience was strictly with some big brands, so I have no idea if even their legal ignores lesser accounts. But we're talking about going for a notarial route, they should at least acknowledge the request.
Big brands have a completely different experience. You can pay a small fee to be verified, which means you're immediately only going to be locked for actual violations (or at least borderline cases), not for things like logging into your account on vacation.
But verification is only available if you're "notable", whatever that means. Definitely not for us small businesses.
1 reply →
> Instagram ToS
I am curious, is there something in there that legally binds them to restore an account automatically disabled? I was under the impression that, since Instagram is a free service offered by a non-state company, they are not legally obligated to keep any account opened. What would the lawyers sue Meta for? As I understand it, if you build a business on instagram and your account gets deleted/disabled for whatever reason, you have no grounds to sue Meta
As my boss at the time eloquently said: LVMH is not gonna take "sorry but our ToS" for an answer after they spend millions in their latest ad campaign because if you squint hard enough you can see Lea Seydoux's nipples. And meta knows that extremely well, so there never was any doubts about them restoring any accounts no matter what the ToS says.