Yeah so Instagram decided to ban my account. For unknown reasons. Probably because of questionable material on the account. Material which consisted mainly of pictures of cats and paper models. I have my suspicions about what my have happened but I don’t know for sure. I think that somebody might have reported my account to Meta and Meta doesn’t do anything but just bans accounts. I started to follow this vegan-account and it was banned by Meta same time as my account.
I could get the account back, though, if I agreed to give my phone number and provide my own face photo to Meta. Those are pretty big privacy issues to hand over to someone as reputable as Meta. So I just decided to let that account go. Which is a shame in itself, as that account had about 160 photos and a lot of followers – far more than on YouTube, for example. And I was more active on Instagram than on YouTube. All of that is now gone.
After the initial shock, I realised that Meta had done me a favour in its own way and a lot of idle scrolling was out of the way. I thought I’d leave making a new account and enjoy my own freedom from having to scroll mindlessly through Instagram. But I made an account again and with a new name @thetuupiainen_ig, but I’ll see if I’ll start updating anything there.
One of the absolute best things about Instagram is the online photo archive, which you can access from anywhere and I miss that. I plan to start collecting and publishing photos on this site, so they are at least in my hands and no mega-company can decide what happens to them.
With Twitter in the eye of the storm, this own Instagram-gate reminded me of the problems that come with these social media platforms. If I can get my photos collected back here, then at least I know they’ll stay here until I decide what to do with them. The good thing about social media platforms is that visitors come along and have the opportunity to find them. The problem with this site is that visitors have to find their way here to see them. But this site is more of a blog for me than reaching out to a large audience.