I had a similar experience. Tried to create an account, but it gave me an error, so I tried again, and it said the account already exists. Clicked on forgot password because I didn't know what the password was, and it said the account was banned for violating the ToS. My theory is that it's because I tried to create an account without linking it to Facebook, so it "accidentally" threw an error, hoping I would create a facebook linked account. Twitter does something similar, where they say a phone number is optional, but they'll immediately lock your new account and say that a phone number is the only way to verify you aren't a bot.

I don't think it's an accident that these high-value tech companies regularly have "errors" when you try to create an account using a method that gives them less access to personal data than other signup methods.

> Twitter does something similar, where they say a phone number is optional, but they'll immediately lock your new account and say that a phone number is the only way to verify you aren't a bot.

Is this recent? I signed up for a Twitter account in late 2017, even used a twitter@mydomain.com custom email address for it, and I have never been forced to add my phone number. Twitter still doesn't have it.

There are some situations I have been able to pindown for when Instagram doesn’t like you. Two of which are not linking to a facebook account and using a personal domain (instead of gmail, outlook etc). Also instagram really hates it if the email contains insta@domain in any form or manner. Also you will have to hand over your phone number. No exceptions!

Weird, I created an extra account earlier this year and didn't need to associate a phone number or FB account with it.

It’s not. I’ve had a similar experience, and I walked away.

Instagram is everything poisonous about Facebook’s values and platform and practices, distilled. They get nothing from me except a temporary email address, a proxy IP, and a false user-agent string.

I'm going to gander a wild guess and say the combination of temporary email address, proxy IP, and false UA string are likely to trip up fake account detection ML algorithms.

The UA string is real, just misleading. The other two resources aren’t public throwaways, the domain and source addresses belong to me, or a version of me (as much as IANA allocated resources can “belong”) and otherwise appear normal, but are only used for traffic to untrustworthy shitweasels.

It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely that it looks like a bot.

I figured it was actually the other way around, or at least a slightly different shade of things; not so much that it looked like a fake account, more than it looked like someone they couldn’t correlate to any other identity and therefore has no consumer surveillance value, ergo I can either fill in the blanks, or fuck off. Whatever the truth of it, I chose the latter

This can happen if you create an account with a username that has "disallowed" words. It's happened to me with usernames that end with "dotcom" or "_com".

I had this experience when I was working with the Facebook Ad Manager.

They arbitrarily blocked my @domain account while my ads were running. They asked me to submit IDs and stuff but haven't heard back in 2 weeks. No other way to contact support except wait.

I am not sure what flagged my account but I wouldn't be surprised if they have significantly lowered the threshold for threat detection in an election year (especially after the scandals uncovered from 2016).

Definitely terrible from a customer experience PoV.

Oh yeah, facebook is the worst, someone signed up using my email address (they don't do verification of email addresses), I get so much spam ..... however there is no way to contact facebook without a facebook account - no email address, no contact form, nothing - their world view is terribly inward looking

Hmm - could you reset the password on the account, and then delete it?

(Personally I'd only be comfortable doing this if this was still a very new account)

Well .... I did reset the password, created a temp gmail account, reassigned the contact email to the new email address then deleted the gmail account (I didn't want to mess with his content) .....

But facebook never forgets, even though I deleted my email address from the account I continue to get spam emails from facebook wondering why I've stopped using 'my' account and encouraging me to come back into the fold

Anecdotally, I was never able to complete signup for Instagram, for similar reasons.

I tried three different email addresses (aliases, really) and had the same problem with all of them.