Help topics

Help topics for social media account problems

This is where our detailed guides live, one problem per guide. Each one explains what the platform officially offers, what you can safely do yourself today, and where hands-on help actually makes a difference.

These help topics cover the account problems people bring us most: getting back into hacked or locked profiles, claiming usernames through legitimate routes, preparing for verification, and cleaning up old posts. Every guide starts with the platform's own forms and help pages, links to them, and explains plainly where outside help fits.

What will the guides cover?

Four areas come first, because they make up most of the messages we receive:

• Account recovery. Hacked, locked, and disabled profiles on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube, Telegram, and Snapchat, including what to do when the recovery email and phone number have both been changed.
• Username acquisition. How to tell whether a name is really taken, when a trademark claim applies, and how platform-approved marketplaces like Telegram's Fragment work.
• Verification. The difference between paid identity checks and notability badges, what each platform asks for, and how to spot the badge-selling scams that target creators.
• Cleanup. Archiving, deleting, and hiding years of posts, tags, and comments with the tools each app provides, plus what to save before you delete anything.

Takedowns of fake and abusive accounts, growth and management, privacy hardening, and business or ad account access are explained on the homepage for now: see takedowns, security hardening, and business pages and ad accounts.

How are these guides put together?

Each guide is written around one question: what would a careful person do if this happened to them today? We start with the platform's own help pages and forms, because those are the only routes that actually change an account's status. Where a platform publishes a waiting period, an eligibility rule, or a form requirement, we quote it and link to the source so you can check it yourself.

We also say plainly what can't be done, such as buying a handle in a way the platform forbids or speeding up a review that's out of everyone's hands. Guides get revisited when platforms change their flows, and each one shows the date it was last checked.

If your problem isn't covered yet, you don't need to wait for a guide. Send us a message with the platform and a screenshot, and we'll point you to the right route.