It’s just another normal day, you pick up the phone and open the Instagram app as you always do. But then you see something unusual, a Meta pop up box. Your chest tightens. Was your post removed? It’s even worse, your account was suspended. Fuck!! A shot of cortisol races through your nervous system. You hold your breath as you click on the blue button to appeal the decision because it seems like there’s no other option. You submit the appeal. Wait. Was that a dangerous move? You have no idea. There’s nothing else you can do on the app. You can’t access anything. As far as you know, you have been deleted.
You are gutted.
It starts to hit you. The accumulated hours that add up to days, weeks months and years of creating art, writing captions, posting to your grid, stories, growing and engaging with your followers, the DM’s. All of it. Gone.
All that time and creative energy that you invested into this app led to..nothing. But a hollow sinking feeling in your stomache.
You question your choices. Was it the last thing you posted? Was it a hater flagging you? If only you knew. You question everything.
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Getting deleted is one of the most stressful experiences that no one talks about. And the reason why no one talks about it is because the ones who got de-platformed have no platform to talk about their experience. And once you do get your account back, you try to be on your best behavior on the platform and pretend like nothing happened. Because ruffling the bots’ feathers might risk you to lose your account again. And so you keep you head down, and continue creating, but with an unnerving thought that it can all disappear again tomorrow.
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And that’s why I want to write about the experience of getting deleted. So that if you are in that unfortunate place, you can at least be affirmed in your experience.
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Here are the stages of emotions that I felt when my account was suspended:
Shock – you can’t believe it happened to you, you feel so wronged, so unlucky
Grief – you just lost a multi-year project you’ve been working on almost everyday therefore you also lost this part of yourself, your routine, your work
Anxiety – will it ever be returned? What if the whitehat hackers can’t get it back? What will this mean for your business? The thought of having to start over from 0 feels gutting and crushing
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That’s the reality of being a sexworker (or anyone working in a sexy/sex-adjacent space) on a platform that is constantly tightening its “community guidelines” so that what you do, say, wear will be held against you as grounds for erasing you.
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First off, know that there is a slew of white hat hackers out there who work inside Meta, or know someone who work inside Meta and they can get your account back. At a cost, of course. Be aware of the hackers who require payment upfront before they get your account back. A good rule of thumb is to go with with someone who only charges you after they get your account back, and who also has a positive review from someone you know, or a friend of a friend can vouch for them.
If you think it’s worth it, invest in a hacker to get your account back. It can cost anywhere form a few hundred to a few thousand (depending on the number of followers you have).
Or you start over from 0. Which feels insanely frustrating!
Or you can ditch IG altogether. And put your attention and content on a less censored app.
It’s really up to you.
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If you go the hacker route, be aware that you’re going to feel anxious during the waiting period of having them work on getting your account back. Like the future of your account / business is in the hands of some stranger whom you can’t really tell if you can trust until they get your account back. And you don’t want to be the annoying client pestering them every other day about the update of your account.
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