Ask HN: Help recovering my wrongfully disabled Instagram archive ( escobarsoap)
I’m totally stuck and could use the collective brainpower here. In March, my Instagram account @escobarsoap got disabled. That page was my passion project: a curated archive of art, music, and cultural finds (think a tiny online museum). I was planning to feature it in my university applications to showcase my work and dedication to cultural preservation.
Here’s everything I’ve tried so far—still nothing:
Appeals via official forms: Filled out every disabled-account appeal on Instagram’s help site.
ID verifications: Uploaded scans/photos of my passport, birth certificate, NIN slip, and vaccine card. Insta’s AI kept rejecting them.
Direct Meta outreach: Messaged any Meta employees or support addresses I could find on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Zero replies.
Community forums: Pounded r/InstagramDisabledHelp, Facebook groups, and support chats—no breakthroughs.
Losing @escobarsoap has been rough: I can’t show my portfolio, my uni apps lack proof of my project, and all those hours of curation are locked behind Meta’s silence.
What I’m hoping for:
Any non-standard appeal routes or contacts at Meta/Instagram
Any weird edge-case suggestions I haven’t tried
Even a pointer to an email, Slack channel, or someone who knows someone at Instagram would mean the world right now. Thanks for reading—and I’d love to pay it forward if anyone else ever gets stuck.
my email is olumidedos@gmail.com if you could help please.
We tried everything but like you found, once they have made a (automated) decision, there doesn't seem to be any fix other than moving forwards with a new plan/account/site/app.
1. I'm incredibly sorry that this has happened to you.
2. Taking a step back from what happened, I think that there's a relatively cheap lesson for you to be learned here. Businesses are literally dying every day at the hand of platforms too big to give a fuck. You've been relatively lucky to experience this early in your career. Imagine this had happened to you ten years from now, with a living to be made and (more) mouths to feed. Regardless of whether you're going to get your data back: you're young, you have your whole career still ahead of you. Platforms are only going to enshittify more, not less. Next time, you're going to have physical backups at multiple locations. You're also going to diversify platforms. Those are important and incredibly helpful habits, and I'm sure you're going to take this incident as an opportunity to pick up those habits. Lots of people have paid much higher prices than you did to learn that life lesson.
Apologies for not being of much help to you and for possibly coming across as unempathetic. I hope you find a way to get your stuff back!