I’m enjoying Instagram both because I get to see what my friends are doing and because I can share some of my more artistic photos, but I’m finding that all of a sudden I’m getting random adverts, scams and spam comments added to the photos I post on Instagram. That stinks. What can I do about it, can I block the spammers?
Glad to see another Instagram fan here, as I definitely enjoy it — and invite you to follow me on Instagram too, I’m d1taylor there — but I also am seeing what you talk about with the spammers and scams and other junk showing up. It’s a sad fact of life that as soon as a social media service becomes popular these bottom dwellers show up, convinced that their desire to make a buck is more important than your post, your photo, your audio sample, whatever it may be.
On Instagram, it seems like it’s tied to you either gaining a certain level of popularity or using a common hashtag that the spammer is monitoring. They doubtless use software that identifies individual Instagram postings and add their blurb as a comment: I’m sure they’re not typing these in by hand.
So far, there doesn’t seem to be much that Instagram is doing about the situation, including no ability to delete annoying spam comments from your own photos, but that’ll have to change as it becomes more and more of a problem which, alas, it inevitably will.
In the interim, what you can do is follow the ID of a spammer and mark them as such in the Instagram app and hope your friends will just ignore the stupid comments on your own photos. It works like this…
Here’s a photo I posted on my Instagram account and you can see that “carolcamargo” added her irrelevant, spammy two cents:
To identify her (tip: it’s probably not a gal) as a spammer to Instagram, I tap on her account name, which produces what is ostensibly her profile:
Looks so benign, doesn’t it? But there’s not a single photo that’s actually personal, is there? In any case, at this point it’s subtle, but you tap on the arrow-box on the top right.
This pops up a few choices:
I can block the user from my material, but I want to report them as a spammer, so I tap on the big red “Report for Spam”, and…
That’s it. Their comment doesn’t vanish from my Instagram posting. Just a “we will review this account” and what that means? I have no idea.
In any case, it’s still better than just suffering through these daft comments!
so I got spam blocked for no reason.. I got hacked one time and I got it back but it wont let me change my bio! I hate my bio and I hate instagram right now, what do I do?
hi plz i need ur hellp! someone took my pictures on instagram and opened new profile with a bad name, and picture of my sun and writing a shitty comments about me my friends and my family!!! i made so many spam report and all of my friends made the same but it still didnt work!!! the fake profile name is delya_minet_dubaybaku. !!! please do something i dont know what to do… u r the only one who can help me.
Hmmm…. does this work, Instagramer?
http://www.twelveskip.com/tutorials/instagram/217/tutorial-unblocking-people-in-instagram-app
It might not because you haven’t “blocked” them. But it’d be interesting to know what Instagram says about their profile when you’re on their profile info page…
I accidentally reported my friend for spam on Instagram. Now I cant see her account. But she can be seen on my sister’s account. She also told me that she didnt block me. What can I do now? I really need to follow her 🙁 Please help me as soon as possible ..
I know this is NOT a fix, and may not work FOR LONG, isn’t 100%, and is a HASSLE, but using this technique I have reduced my spam to 2 incidences in 5 days. I was previously getting 12-15 PER image.
set your profile to private
post a photo
tag the photo
wait 4-5 minutes
set your profile to public
Apparently the spam bots don’t look back in time more than a few minutes. This delay in going public seems to avoid them and yet allow others (non-followers) to see my photos.
Your mileage may vary.
dave , just fyi, today , 4/12 , there´s a protest against spam , in which users are changing their profile photos for a protest symbol of an anti-spam fist and turning their photos private-only for a day. will it solve spam? obviously not, but we (myself included) have managed to attract attentions of the powers that be at instagram, who will you believe this? are actually deleting inter-user communications they deem inappropriate in an offensive way to themselves ! combatting spam seems to be lower down on their priority list of actions. oh well … and oh, one of the users, @joshjohnson has written to @zuck, who of course is mark zuckerberg alerting him of the crisis. let´s hope ´mark´ sees this as a threat to his company value, if for no other reason. check us out. i appear under my own name – @robertkstephen. have a nice day !
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