🛑 Instagram Just Quietly Apologized and Reinstated My Account. After Banning Me 19 months ago. After Telling Me It Was Deleted.

It’s visible. It’s verified. 5.5 million followers are still there. But I can’t log in. I can’t reset my password. I'd like to use my account again.

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On December 24th of 2023, Instagram banned me from the platform without warning.

They didn’t just suspend my account. They banned it entirely — permanently.
No appeal. They said it was a lifetime ban. I was shocked.

The CEO of Instagram literally followed me.
I was a guest speaker multiple times at Meta HQ.
Mark Zuckerberg’s wife gave nearly $1 million to our charity.
I spoke to executives at Meta OFTEN, and considered many of them to be my friends, some for over a decade, before I was banned.

They claimed it was due to a violation of their policy on “dangerous individuals and organizations.”

And then they told me my account and all of its data had been deleted.

For 19 months, my account was gone.
No access. No visibility. No recovery.

And then something happened.

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Yesterday morning I received a notification from Meta in my email.

“You're back on Instagram, shaunking. You can use shaunking again.”

"We reviewed your account and found that the activity on it does follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organizations, so you can use Instagram again."

That’s not a rumor. That’s not a glitch.
That’s Meta — after 19 months — admitting they got it wrong.

They literally wrote, 19 months later, “We’re sorry we got this wrong, and that you weren’t able to use Instagram for a while.”

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I checked the account. It’s there.

Verified. Active. 5.5 million followers. 6,037 posts.

Not a single one was deleted.

But there’s a problem:

I can’t log in.
I can’t reset the password.
The "Forgot Password" button does nothing.
Every path to recovery — through the app, through Meta, through their help center — has been blocked.

I can see that people are commenting. I’m even receiving email notifications that people are sending me DMs. But I can’t respond. I can’t get in.

DO YOU SEE MY ACCOUNT ON IG? Here is the link.

My account is public. But I’ve been locked out.

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This is how suppression works in 2025.

Meta told me my account was gone.
They told me the data was deleted.
But they were lying.

They kept everything.

They just banned me from the public.
From the people.
From 5.5 million followers I spent a decade building.

And now — without explanation — the account is back.
You can see it. But I can’t access it.

This is proof of everything we’ve been saying:

• The bans are political

• The enforcement is manual, not algorithmic

• The appeals are fake

• And they still have all the data, even after they say it’s deleted

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What hurts the most…

This isn’t just about posts or numbers.

Inside that account are some of the most personal and irreplaceable moments of my life.

• My private messages with Jason, my dear brother who died of pancreatic cancer.

• My conversations with dozens of Palestinian journalists — many of whom have now been martyred.

• My DMs with Nipsey Hussle, who was killed in 2019.

• A group chat with my wife and kids.

• Conversations with thousands of people all over the world, many of which changed my life.

• And even in my bio, I had asked people to follow Palestinian journalists who were alive when I was last on the app — many of them are now gone.

It’s all there.

And I can’t touch it.

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I want to be back.

I would like to be back on the platform. And I will — as I always did — work to operate within Instagram’s rules and guidelines.

But right now, I’ve been reinstated… and locked out.

I have no idea what’s really going on.

So I’m saying this now — publicly — before they do.

This is not about me being dangerous.
It never was.
This is about control.
Narrative. Power. And silence.

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