Your Pinterest account has been suspended and reactivated

If you had your Pinterest account suspended, there is a chance you can get it restored, as long as you have access to the email account you registered with.

 

Pinterest Account Suspended

We wanted to let you know we suspended your Pinterest account because of some activity we believe goes against our spam policies.

On Pinterest, spam includes saving lots of unwanted or repetitive stuff, trying to game our systems, or posting fraudulent, deceptive or unsolicited commercial messages. We block spam like this because it creates a bad experience for other people on Pinterest.

If you think we made a mistake, please click this link, and we will review your account within 48 hours.

Please note that the link above will expire after 7 days.

I received the email above some time ago, and I didn’t think that clicking the link to have them review the suspension would do any good, but I figured I had nothing to lose, so I clicked it.

 

Thank you for your appeal

After clicking the link above, if your appeal is successful you will see a page like this:

Thanks for your appeal!

We will take a look soon.

Okay, good enough. Then I moved on with my work and forgot about it…

Note: If you’re using an extension on your browser to change your user agent to a mobile device, then appealing a suspension may not work. Make sure you’re using your regular browser as it is when opening that link.

 

Pinterest Account Reactivated

Within 24-48 hours I received this:

Sorry for the trouble! It looks like we made a mistake when we deactivated your account. It’s up and running again, so you can get right back to saving Pins you find.

That was a pleasant surprise, as I wasn’t expecting they would restore my account.

 

Pinterest Account Not Reactivated

If you appeal a suspension and you get rejected, you will receive an email like this:

A note about your Pinterest account

We took a look at your account and decided not to reactivate it because we noticed activity that goes against our spam policy. You won’t be able to access your Pins or messages.

The Pinterest Team

 

Summing up

If you ever get your Pinterest account suspended, just login to the email you registered with, find the email and click the link. They will review the account and get back to you within 24-48 hours. There’s no guarantees you’ll get your account reactivated, but it’s worth a shot.

I guess if you follow the steps and they refuse to restore your account, you can always contact Pinterest and try to get them to review your account further, but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up at that point.

If all else fails, just create a new Pinterest account and keep doing what you were doing… well, maybe not exactly what you were doing as it clearly resulted in a suspension, but try to figure out what you did wrong (bad proxy, excessive following/repinning, etc) and try to fix it.

 

Here is a video I made talking about this:

 

Final thoughts

All in all, this is a nice option by Pinterest, because algorithms can always mistakenly ban accounts, and so an ability to appeal and have a human review your account is important. That said, maybe allowing only 7 days to appeal a suspension is kind of short. What if you’re on holiday or in the hospital or whatever and don’t get to it within 7 days? I believe they should extend that to 14 days.

Lastly, on the one hand I feel like they should allow you to actually type something when you appeal a suspension. Maybe you can list the reason why you think you were suspended, or even admit to doing something that goes against their policies, and ask for a second chance. That said, in the past I’ve appealed suspensions on Twitter – where they do allow you to state your case when appealing a suspension – but I don’t really think anyone reads that stuff.

Once I appealed my own suspended Twitter account, phone verified, and I wrote a long message that this is my real account and gave them my Facebook link and all the proof that this is my real account. On the same day I appealed a suspended fake account. Twitter restores my fake account, and tells me that my real account will remain suspended.

Now you may be thinking that Twitter is Twitter, and Pinterest is Pinterest, two different companies. But these companies/websites are all the same. Once they get past a certain point in popularity and users, forget about human support, it’s all done by machines and algorithms, and probably artificial intelligence going forward.

In any case, good for you Pinterest for allowing users to appeal suspended accounts, and thank you for restoring my account there.