Someone must have traduced erikl1963 because without having done anything wrong he found his Instagram account permanently suspended one fine morning. 

Well, apparently I did do something wrong. My account, or activity on it, wasn’t following Meta’s “Community Standards on account integrity.” I know. Meta has Community Standards? That are important enough to use the title case? But there it is, in the email, with a link to a page that explains nothing. 

There’s also a “Review details” button that leads to a webpage:

How we made this decision
Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action.

Our technology found out so our technology took action? Yeah, we’re doomed.

But like Josef K., I was allowed to appeal my case—whatever it was. First, I was asked for my email address so a confirmation code could be sent. So a robot could determine I wasn’t a robot, as John Mulaney succinctly put it six years ago.

Then it asked for my phone number. At this point I triple-checked the email addresses and URLs to make sure everyone was who they said they were. At this point, too, I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a scam, by Instagram, to get me to give up my phone number. Or had I already given it up? I didn’t remember.

I’ve only been on Instagram since Sept. 1, 2023. I left Facebook in 2019 because Meta is awful, and I left Twitter in 2022 because Elon Musk is awfuller. I experimented with other social media sites, hating myself all the while—that I actually have this need now, this daily need, to engage without engaging, to see what’s going down, kinda, to drink the salt water because I’m so, so thirsty, and these other sites, sadly, pathetically, didn’t help much with that thirst, not even in the awful salt-watery way that Twitter or Facebook had, which is why, eventually, I re-upped with Zuckerberg, opening an account on Instagram, tail tucked between my legs.

I wasn’t a fan. I’m a word guy, it’s a picture site. It’s worse than a picture site, it’s a video site. It’s worse than that as we all know and for all the reasons we know. But once in a while someone I like posts a picture I like.

I tried to do the same. It was on Instagram that I posted photos of my older brother Chris and I at Mount Rainier when he came to visit me in Seattle in Oct. 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted childhood photos of Chris and I with a link to his obituary after he was murdered in a random attack at a busstop in Edina, Minn. on November 22, 2023. And it was on Instagram that I posted various photos of my 16-year-old cat Jellybean in the hallway of our condo. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Jellybean’s obituary when we had to put her to sleep—kill her—in December 2023 after she continued to suffer following a cancer diagnosis. And it was on Instagram that I posted photos of our new kitten, Clem, short for Clemente, in Feb. 2024. And it was on Instagram that I posted a link to Clem’s obituary after 11 days of dysentery and four vet visits with 4-6 different vets, none of whom realized the scope of his problem, the last of whom couldn’t stabilize him at 5:00 on a Saturday morning. 

Yeah, it hasn’t been a good year. Oh, and the notice of my permanent suspension on Instagram came one year after my brother’s murder. To the day. Nice touch, Meta. 

Anyway, I entered my mobile number so its technology could send me a confirmation code to prove my identity to its technology one more time. Nothing happened. Instead, beneath the fill-in box, there appeared a little red message:

Code not sent: Try again later or use a different mobile number. 

Somewhere, Kafka smiles.

If I ever find out what I did to warrant permanent suspension from a social media platform I don’t like, I’ll let you know. But at this point, it feels like a gift.

**

UPDATE: Same day, evening, the “Code not sent” glitch—if it was a glitch—was fixed, Instagram sent me a code to verify my account, I did, and for one brief shining moment it let me know I was appealing its decision. And then this, literally a second later. 

As I suspected, it just wanted the phone number. “Sometimes we need to take precautions to ensure that everyone's data on Instagram is safe and usable and sellable by Instagram.”