Yogscast streamer Squid Gaming had her Instagram account temporarily banned; seemingly after fans of Squid Game reported it for “pretending to be someone else.”
Lydia Ellery, also known as Squid Gaming, tweeted that her account was banned on October 8th. She suspected it was due to their mass reporting or others trying to access her account. Her Instagram username is “squidgame;” much like her Twitch username, and the South Korean Netflix drama Squid Game. The show has amassed 111 million fans; Netflix’ biggest launch to date.
It could be the show’s large number of fans thought Ellery had set up an Instagram account recently to piggyback off the success of the show. The shows fans have been accused of taking things too far before however.
When a real life phone number appeared in the show, a dessert shop owner in Seongju county received thousands of prank calls a day– hindering her business and leaving her medically diagnosed with acute stress disorder. Netflix stated they would edit the scene with the phone number in it. The owner rejected a show representative’s offer of ₩1 million KRW ($840 USD) to pay for a new phone.
Speaking to Insider, Ellery revealed when she had got back into her account, an automatic message said she had violated Instagram’s policies on “pretending to be someone else.”
In fact, some fans who had messaged Ellery were seemingly angry she had that username, and wanted it for themselves. In some recent posts by Ellery [1, 2, 3], some users outright asked her to be given the username.
Ellery later revealed that, along with being inundated with messages from the fans herself, that her story soon climbed to the front page of Reddit. Thanks to the high-profile nature of the show (leading to other news reports and a video by Keemstar on the matter), Ellery’s Instagram was unbanned in 24 hours.
Ellery thanked her fans for drawing Instagram’s attention to the matter, and still seemed in high enough spirits to joke about the matter; posting the scene from the first episode where the main character is carried to safety; with Reddit carrying her.
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