I wrote an IG script to automate my personal account (3 year-old acct). At first I was getting action blocked just from just VIEWING pages too fast. Then I slowed my script down and got action blocks for liking too many posts, then from following. Then I got to a point where I could run it for 24 hours without action blocks. It’s slow however, it’s at the speed of a lazy social media intern, so in 2 days I’ve gone from 30 to 100 followers.
My question is: Does the disappearance of the action blocks mean I’m in the clear, or is it possible that a ban might fall from the sky someday? I’m worried that I’ll be at 5k and suddenly have my account banned with a message like “WE KNEW YOU WERE BOTTING ALL ALONG HAHAHA!”
Or does IG detect automated activity and respond with blocks/bans in real time?
Second…How many follows and likes should I aim for daily? And how long should I wait between script runs?
FWIW:
If you’re curious, I tried to have my script mimick human behavior as much as possible (and still improving it). It does the following:
Goes to through a list of influencers, storing the likes from their latest posts in a file.
Navigates to each liker’s page, looks at their follower/following ratio, and decides whether to follow them or like them.
If the decision is to follow, scrolls down their page (random scroll length within a predetermined range). then up or down again (randomly) then back up to the follow button and clicks it.
After clicking follow, waits a random amount of time between 3 to 5 minutes, and navigates to the next user in the list.
It does the same for people whose posts I’m just liking.
I also use the account manually form my phone to answer DMs, like some other posts I actually do like, etc…
Well, I eventually DID get an action block. But I could still like and follow from the phone app. Then I tried something. I signed into my instagram from a different chrome profile, and I could like and follow again with no action blocks as long as I didn’t go crazy. So the action block seems cookie based, which is super weird.
I’ve now converted my profile to a business account and will only run the script while tethering from my phone’s 4g connection. Them I’m goingt o speed the script up and see what happens.
As an extra bit of detail, it emulates an Iphone X user agent and loads the mobile site by default. I also don’t have to login every time because it just opens a browser that has my IG session saved.
Yes, the blocks are tied to your session/cookies. Simply resetting your cookies will alleviate the block… but if you do it too many times within a short period of time, the follows will begin to be ghosted.
Yes, I’m using Selenium Webdriver. The only way IG can detect Selenium specifically is by looking for the navigator.webdriver property. I’ve disabled this property so the browser identifies itself exactly like . anormal browser.
It’s still possible to detext that I’m a bot (though without being able to tell if I"m selenium or pupeteer or something else). I’m not sure how they do it but distill networks have technology that can do this. If IG uses that then I guess they know.
