How to Get Rid of Bots on Instagram
In the last year or so, the rise of bots on Instagram and other social media platforms like TikTok has been out of control.
On both my own Instagram accounts and my client’s, comments from bots have been taking over our posts. You may notice lots of fake accounts commenting something along the lines of: “Promote this on our page!” Or you may encounter comments from Instagram bots with a canned response that says you’d be a great ambassador or collaborator for their brand.
Whether those comments are genuine or not is up for debate. I personally have never answered them and don’t see any value in responding to people who aren’t genuinely engaging with me or my clients. When engaging with commenters, you can tell which ones are speaking to you directly or copying and pasting a general mass message that somehow made it to your post.
Another way that bot accounts can reach you is through your DMs. These accounts will be filtered into the “Request” tab in your direct messages because these are people you don’t follow. You may notice fake accounts sending you requests for a collab, all of which are super spammy. Obviously, I wouldn’t engage with people who aren’t following you unless they’re real people interested in your business or have a question.
Lastly, you may notice inactive accounts start following you, even though they seem fake. As a social media manager, I had a client recently that accumulated thousands of fake followers from a different country through Reels that went viral. I think people make these fake accounts and become ghost followers because they just want to lurk in the shadows and not be known. This client was a swimwear brand and we had thousands of men with inactive profiles following our account.
Ahead, learn more about removing these bots and their pestering messages, and understand why they’re there in the first place.
What is a bot on Instagram?
A bot is a fake account on Instagram that doesn’t have an active account and may leave spammy comments on your posts and send you spammy messages.
How do you get rid of Instagram bots?
Click the three lines (AKA “the hamburger icon”) on the upper right corner of your Instagram profile. Click settings —> privacy. Here you’ll see “hide comments” will automatically be turned on, which means any offensive words will be hidden from your comments section.
Under “custom words and phrases” you can hide other comments and messages that you don’t want to see by creating a custom list of words, phrases, and emojis.
Here are common words to hide:
Promote
Collab
Dm us
Click “manage list” and type in the words you want to hide. Then click “Hide comments” and “Hide message requests” [that contain these words].
Give that a try and hopefully, you’ll sleep easier at night knowing you won’t be bombarded with spam messages every time you get an Instagram notification! Genuine comments only from here on out.
How do I stop spam bots on Instagram?
What you can do is block these accounts, so that they don’t bother anyone else and are removed from Instagram. We can also go through our follower list every once in a while, removing bots and unwanted followers that aren’t adding value to our audience. These bot accounts are dead weight to your actual number of followers. They can also mess with your true engagement rate and other metrics.
Input addressed these spam comments in 2020 when they wrote about spammy porn service comments and get-rich-quick schemes. Now that I think about it, I also see many “This person saved my life and made me richer,” comments too. Unfortunately, as of 2020, there are estimated to be about 150 million fake accounts on Instagram. There’s only so much blocking one could do! Apparently, Facebook has made this a priority for them; to remove any inauthentic activity. But it’s become so widespread, that maybe they can’t keep up? Who really knows.
Influencers and celebrities have it worse than the everyday Instagram account, with spam messages getting out of hand.
Why is Instagram full of bots?
There isn’t a clear-cut answer and it doesn’t seem like Instagram or rep Adam Mosseri has acknowledged how they’re going to clean up these spammer messages. Bots are created to send automation messages that lure readers into interacting with a scam — whether it’s a porn service, pyramid scheme, or fake collaboration opportunity.
These bots may find you through hashtags, location, and other unidentifiable ways. If you answer them, they’ll probably offer you a discount on an item from their low-quality website and promise an affiliate link in return once you post about their brand. But you’ll never actually get an affiliate link and they’ll probably ghost you once you’ve posted about their brand and given them free advertising.
Don’t engage with bot followers. Remove bot followers even if they lower your follower count. Unfollow any fake accounts and make sure your hidden comments are turned on!
