Dunbar for Mayor Campaign Locks Down Instagram Due to Influx of "Suspicious Bots"

The Instagram account of the Dunbar campaign has been made private by the campaign after being followed by "thousands of suspicious bots," according to Anchorage Mayoral Candidate Forrest Dunbar, who made the announcement on social media earlier this afternoon.

Dunbar wrote that suspicious accounts following the Dunbar campaign on Instagram have the potential to get the campaign's account suspended and dilute their advertising on the social media platform just days before the May 11 mayoral runoff election.

Instagram bots are automated accounts that follow legitimate accounts on their service. As more inauthentic accounts follow an Instagram account, posts from relevant and legitimate users tend to get buried. These inauthentic accounts also violate Instagram's Terms of Service and could potentially have the Dunbar campaign's Instagram account shadow-banned or terminated altogether.

Claire Shaw, Campaign Manager for the Dunbar Campaign when reached for comment by email, wrote:

"We noticed yesterday that our campaign Instagram follower count was growing at a pretty unusual clip - we went from a thousand followers and change to over 5,000 within a couple of hours. We do not know at this time why so many bots or "ghost accounts" have begun to follow the account or where they came from. Instagram can choose to suspend or ban accounts that have too many fake followers, which is one possible explanation if this were some sort of malicious attack. At the moment we do not know why this happened. We've temporarily made the account private to prevent additional follows from fake accounts."

Claire Shaw, Campaign Manager, Dunbar Campaign, May 9, 2021

This is a developing story and will be updated if more information becomes available.