Instagram error explained: We restrict certain activity to protect our community. – Vista Social

It is possible that you may have seen an error when publishing to Instagram that reads: "We restrict certain activity to protect our community. Tell us if you think that we've made a mistake.”

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Unfortunately, if you’re experiencing any variation of this message, it means your account is temporarily action blocked on Instagram.

What does this error mean?

In order to protect the platform from spammers, bots, and other malicious 3rd parties, Instagram and Facebook rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and enforce their rules. If you are seeing this error this means that Instagram’s AI has concluded that it’s possible you could be a bot and want to test you. They freeze your account from being able to like, follow, comment, save, post, etc. Their goal is to see if you stop up or keep trying to carry out functions over and over (like a bot would do).

How to fix the error?

We have found that the best way to work around the error is to stop posting to Instagram for a couple of days. This does mean - no publishing, no following and unfollowing, etc. If you are using any tools that automate your Instagram, please disconnect them.

More things to try

If you prefer not to wait here are some recommendations that we have identified, based on user reports, that appear to fix the issue right away. It is worth saying that these recommendations are based on anecdotal evidence from users and are not guaranteed to work.

#1 Reset the password from a computer that you have not used before.

I know this might sound unusual, but based on user feedback, this solution is almost always successful.

The idea is simple: Instagram might be suspicious of activity on your profile. When you log in from a new computer or browser, it raises their suspicion even more. However, by going through the password reset steps, you reassure Instagram that you are the legitimate user. This process helps confirm your identity and shows that no bots are involved.

So, simply follow these steps:

On a different computer, go to Instagram and click on Forgot password
Go through all the steps and change your password
Go to Vista Social and try scheduling a single image. If it works - awesome! If it does not, you may need to consider other options in this article.
Once you confirm that a single post works, you can go ahead and publish multiples of images or videos.

#2 Show Instagram you are not a bot

You can perform a certain action that gives Instagram an indication that you are a human and not a bot:

Verify your phone / email address
Link your Facebook with your Instagram
Enable two-factor authentication
Change your password

#3: Remove all 3rd party apps

Removing 3rd party apps you can make sure that no other app is causing you this trouble.

#4 Remove the link from your bio

Just in case the link in your bio is causing this - you can remove it and see if it helps. Sometimes Instagram considers certain links to be spammy and can indeed block your account.

#5 Contact Instagram support

If you have tried all of the above, including taking a break from posting on Instagram and 2-3 days later you are still getting this error you may consider contacting Instagram support.