How to Protect Yourself from Instaspam?

Instaspam is a spam that often affects Instagram and contains unsolicited messages that can ruin your photos in Instagram. With the tremendous growth in technology, spam has also equally grown. This spam can be displayed in many ways, such as fake profiles, fake friends, fake followers, etc.

When an Instagram account is spammed, it may result in your photo getting affected, or receiving messages to like a post, or automated and unnecessary comments that can appear on a photo. Another thing that can get affected is the reduction in the followers count.

Here are a few tips as to how to deal with Instaspam:

1] Delete/ Remove Undesired People:

Though spam is disastrous for any Instagram account, it can largely impact users with a large number of followers, including big companies and celebrities. The Instagram authority tried to destroy these fraudulent accounts and was able to sweep many accounts, though the number of the affected accounts was not disclosed by them.

Some famous celebrities whose Instagram accounts were spammed are Akon, Justin Bieber and Matt McGory. Akon lost more than half of his Instagram followers and moreover he was accused of paying his followers. In response to these allegations, Akon deleted his Instagram account. In case of Justin Bieber, he lost 3,538,228 followers on Instagram due to spam.

2] Avoid Instaspam:

Making Instagram account private can help in reducing the probability of this spam attack, as you will be sharing the photos you upload only with limited and known people. Also, you can use some apps that can help in recognizing the spam and reporting it. It has been found that some hashtags that many people use can attract this spam. Removing those kinds of hashtags that are very generic can help in avoiding the spam attack.

According to Kieran Strange, a British pop rock artist, every spam has different categories and she classified Instaspammers as;

Passive Spammers: Here the account has a bio and just one photo. The bio reads, “To get more followers, click on this link.”

Aggressive spammers: These are almost similar to passive spammers except that they add comments, such as “check out this link” on your photos.

Logrolling spammers: These are real accounts of people that ask others to like their photos. They do this by liking your photos and asking you to like their photos.

3] Report:

If you have already tried options like removing the hashtags or undesired people, or if you don’t want to make your account private, another great option is find and report the wrongdoer.

In Instagram, there is an option to report the abuse but this process is quite slow. Here individual comments, accounts and posts need to be flagged as spams. There are also some applications available to help with this process, such as Insta Ghost, IG Exorcist or Spotless.

Lastly, the best thing that you can do is be alert and add people carefully.