Zombie Proof BJJ and MMA owner resurrects IG account after deletion

Kent Peters, owner and head instructor of Zombie Proof Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts in Nova Scotia. recently became one of the few people to return from the Instagram graveyard after his account, which has more than 21,800 followers, was deleted.

The UFC is going crazy with copyright stuff,” said Peters to Chris Connors for the Cape Breton Post. “So the UFC is putting all these bots out there, saying ‘You reposted an event,’ and then they take your post down or they ban you. Well, my account got fully deleted. I got an email at 2:18 a.m. saying your account has been disabled because of this — it was a free event — and then five minutes later I got an email saying, ‘Your account will not be reinstated.’

It really did affect me. It instantly took one-fourth of my views away, and that’s going towards selling gear. It sounds weird to say, but you put so much time into building up all these videos to put that content out there to have that number so high where it really was monetized for me — I was making money off it — and Instagram just decides it’s gone. It was a business tool. It makes you realize how fickle the Internet is — they can just take away your platform. It wasn’t like I was putting out hateful comments, hateful speech or anything; I had one free event repost and the UFC said, ‘I don’t like that, it’s mine,’ so Instagram just deleted the account.

The good news is Peters messaged the online magazine Jiu-Jitsu Times, which published a short article that caught the eye of Ryan Tuleja, a controls specialist at Facebook, who looked into what happened.

He triggered the algorithms to check and you’re supposed to get three warnings — I got one and then I was instantly deleted, so he thinks it was an overeager analyst or a bot. I’m one of the original Instagram zombies.”

It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It always sounds weird saying it, but I’m one of those four-year overnight successes. I’ve been doing this for four years just building followers slowly — I never had any crazy viral videos that got me a ton of views, it’s just been a slow, steady grind — so it’s pretty cool. I’ve made a lot of friends over it.

Canadian MMA analyst Robin Black too had had an account banned and resurrected, and that may be it. For example, Eddie Bravo reached out tp Peters for help bringing an account back. So it can be done …