I do a fine impersonation of myself.
That’s according to the bots in charge of policing our human identites.
It took just two days for me to go from finally opening my own Instagram account to have it permanently shut down.
Two days in which I uploaded nothing. No posts. No reels. No Threads.
Yet somehow this absence of activity left the bots at Meta convinced that I was one of them. A malicious machine out to cause mischief in the guise of a little-known Melbourne writer.
Turns out the machines that now run the world are unwittingly great at irony.
They gave me one chance. Kind of. They asked me for a selfie and ID, which I provided. But having a driver’s licence and my own face wasn’t enough. The algorithms conferred, and decided the person corresponding with them wasn’t Warwick Holt, aka wokholt, at all.
Acting as judge, jury and executor, the bots “disabled” my account. Forever. With no recourse, no way to voice dissent, not even anywhere I can ask a polite “why?”
How did I get here? Consider me mystified. Below is my personal account of how the bots decided that I was one of them.
Late to the party
I know that 2026 seems like a ripe old time for a middle-aged man to get on Instagram. Particularly as Meta is going well beyond the good old days of using Cambridge Analytica to influence elections and getting right into destroying democracy, with the new Meta President fresh off being an advisor to Demented Donald. If anything, now is the time to be getting off Insta and Facebook and WhatsApp and anything Zuckface has touched.
Truth is I’ve been lurking on Insta for a good while, under the brucetheseries handle. But I am not Bruce the Series. I am in fact not a series at all.
It’s become increasingly clear that it would be better to have an account of my own, if only to be able to post about things beyond a nearly decade-old web series, and interact with the many other people that I know or are interested in who have Instagram accounts.
As it turns out, there may be too many such people.
Following the crowd
I opened my account, using the same handle, wokholt, that I use on Bluesky and once upon a time on the paedo-Nazi abomination that used to be called Twitter.
And then I started following friends and family.
Instagram offered me so many suggestions! I realised just how many of my Facebook friends were on there with accounts. Along with people I knew from the Bruce Insta I’d easily get into the high hundreds. And so I smashed that follow button: Follow, Follow, Follow…
After about forty clicks, I suddenly hit a block. A pop-up message told me to “Try again later: We limit how often you can do certain things on Instagram to protect our community. Tell us if you think we made a mistake.” There were two options, “OK” and “Let us know”.
Try again later. How later? What had I done?
I found it hard to believe, but a web search suggested that Instagram limited follows to about 150 per day, and around 20 or so per hour. Instagram didn’t tell me this, of course. Instagram never said anything about follow limits.
In fact Instagram seemed very keen for me to not just follow everyone I knew on Facebook, but also scour my contacts for more accounts it could suggest. Access which I denied it.
Armed with the knowledge that I would only be able to follow a few accounts at a time, I took a break from my follow frenzy, even as friends were following me back.
I tried to follow people a couple of times over the next couple of hours, getting the same message. Eventually, I got through and was able to follow some more accounts. This time I was more judicious, only following about 15.
Then an hour or so later I came back and followed another bunch. Was this what it was going to take?
But then it happened again. “Try Again Later”. And I got stuck. Stuck on a bit over 70 followed accounts total. And it remained that way for the rest of the day, right through to the next morning.
Trying again later
Some time a bit more than 24 hours after I first opened the account, the block again stopped. So I followed some more accounts, slowly, judiciously, starting with friends who had followed me that I hadn’t already got to. Occasionally I got the pop-up again, telling me again I had to try again later.
Again, once I got to around a bit over 70 follows for the day, done in small batches, that was seemingly my lot for the day.
It seemed that 150 accounts/day was optimistic. I had barely been allowed that many over two days. Frustrated, I smashed that “Let us know” button. It didn’t give me any space to actually let them know. Just press the button and I guess I should consider them told.
70ish people had followed me back though. I liked a few posts. I struck up a chat with a newish friend curious that I’d decided to be myself. I’d wanted to build my network before posting, though I was thinking about maybe jumping on the that ‘2016 was ten years ago’ trend.
But I did decide to stick in a Note. A little text status. Let the people who did hit my page know that it really was me and that I might even use the platform. And that if I hadn’t followed them yet, it was nothing personal.
IIRC, my one and only Instagram Note was:
Ugh, this max 70 follows a day thing is painful
My son privately responded:
painful
And I replied:
in the arse
Suspended
Did this meek peep of protest enrage the bot authorities? I hate to be a paranoid android, but they sure acted like it.
This email was sent pretty much exactly 48 hours after I first opened the account. But it had been filed away by the Gmail bots as Social and therefore I didn’t get a notification. (As a side note, I’m not sure whether the broken images in these email screenshots are due to a battle of the bots. Though I see no reason not to assume so.)
I’d already got the message though – when I opened Instagram.
My account was gone. I didn’t meet the “standards on account integrity” – meaning they didn’t believe I was me. Or even a person at all.
Had a missed clicking a small portion of a bus on a CAPTCHA?
I couldn’t see my followers or followees. All I could see was a web page asking me to prove my identity or my account would be deleted.
To get back access to my account I had to upload a selfie and a piece of ID eg. a birth certificate, passport or other official documentation.
OK. Whatever. I thought maybe my driver’s license may be the better option. At least that way if it was leaked, people could only steal my identity to travel inside Australia. Plus I already had a scan saved from all the other times institutions have wanted proof that I’m me.
I took a selfie then and there. Looking impressed with the whole situation.
The licence upload didn’t seem to go through properly the first time. Because, I guess, Internet. I tried it a second time, and it seemed to work. Though I’m not sure which attempt this email referred to:
But I never got to log back in, because I didn’t see that email until I also saw this email, which was sent just one hour later:
That was that. The bots had spoken. All that was left of my account was the shots you see at the top of this article.
You cannot request another review of this decision.
Another review? Excuse me Mr Gram, what review did I request? You requested a review, then you nuked my account because… who knows. Maybe my licence photo’s watermark gave your facial recognition software conniptions.
My best guess is that I’d Tried Again to follow accounts, as instructed, too many times. (Although it wasn’t that many times.) The logic seemed to be that only a bot or a scammer could possibly want to follow more than 150 people in two days. Did I not read their vaguely worded, ambiguous, detail-free notification?
I’m not alone. There’s a whole swathe of people out there online who have been unable to convince Meta’s bots of their humanity. (Either that, or this army of scammers have just found in me the ultimate sucker.)
Someone on Reddit had apparently been able to get their account reinstated by going to the About disabled Instagram accounts section on the Instagram help page, clicking “no” to the “Was this helpful?” prompt, and then using the 500 character feedback box to explain the situation. It didn’t work for me.
Another suggestion was to write a letter to Meta and another to your Attorney-General. For an account with precisely zero posts, appealing to the country’s top legal authority seemed like slight overkill.
The final suggestion: get help by making my Facebook account Meta Verified. Pay Meta to fix their mistake. What sort of shakedown is this? Maybe the Attorney-General should be told.
Personal enshittification
So I don’t have an Instagram account, oh well, big deal, I haven’t had an Instagram account for the rest of my life either.
And if Instagram doesn’t get my hot takes, sunset shots and food porn, that’s Instagram’s loss.
But that’s not really the point.
This shouldn’t be difficult. We’re continually sold on the idea of automation as a way to make things better and more efficient. Maybe once upon a time that was true. But for years now, we have been seeing waves of technology that make existing in the world as a human being worse and more cumbersome.
The reason I can’t contact anyone, human or machine, to request a review, is that helping users isn’t profitable. Cutting costs and milking the user always trumps actual improvement. As Corey Doctorow so elegantly summed it up: enshittification.
The burden of work has been shifted onto the user. You are compelled to provide data, phone numbers, dates of birth, by organisations that should not need, and never previously needed, such data. Inevitably this data leaks, and you’re required to spend ever greater portions of your life proving who you are, to satisfy the algorithms. Algorithms which are now being handed over to AI, which I can well believe means no human being even really understands how they make decisions.
We now have bots which have to devote so many resources to policing other bots that they invent arcane and opaque tests for people to prove their humanity. Innocent and obviously human actions like trying to follow other people on your platform, which I had believed was kind of the point, are treated with the utmost suspicion.
Of course, there’s a lot wrong with the world now, and have a social media account futz out isn’t really a big deal.
Or is it? So much of what we see in the world today is a result of the warped view people get in their online bubbles. Who gets to see what, or even if you get to see or say anything at all, is all down to the tech titans and/or their algorithms. Increasingly the latter.
And that is a big deal.
So what now?
That’s a good question, blog subheading.
I’m in two minds about trying again. I know Insta is lots of people’s favourite means of socialing, especially among media folk. An account would be a good place to connect and let you all know about what I’m up to.
Which includes a long-gestating project about the people waging war against an AI-fuelled Internet. That’s bot-level irony right there. Or perhaps that’s the real reason why the bots hate me.
I can be found elsewhere on the Internet, and if you’ve read this far, I encourage you to do so: Bluesky, LinkedIn, the Media Empire YouTube could do with more followers, you could inflate my IMDB rating, or check out what I’m listening to at last.fm. You can even help the Meta bots acknowledge me by following Media Empire on Facebook. For now, at least.
You can even subscribe to this blog on RSS, if like me you’re stuck in the past. The trend these days is to have a Substack, but this rusty ol’ blog has worked for me for over 20 years now, which is an eternity in Internet terms and speaks to the benefits of owning the distribution platform.
I don’t even have to prove to myself that I’m me.
But if Insta is your main thing, I’m sorry. Maybe you can post this for me.
And if you do happen to get a follow from someone pretending to be me, it probably is me. Unless the scambots see this as a dare.
