Developer Builds Open-Source Python Tool to Detect and Remove Instagram Bots
A developer has released InstaPurge, an open-source Python tool designed to help users identify and remove bot accounts from their Instagram followers. The tool uses a four-layer architecture comprising an Instagram data bridge, a bot-scoring engine, a rate-limited action queue, and an audit-safety layer. Bot detection relies on profile heuristics such as missing profile pictures and skewed follower-to-following ratios, with accounts scored as 'bot', 'suspicious', or 'human'. Because Instagram's official APIs do not support follower management for personal accounts, the tool relies on private API libraries like instaloader, with all data stored locally via SQLite for privacy. The developer has flagged key challenges including Instagram's rate limits and false positives, and plans future upgrades such as ML-based detection and a web dashboard.
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