Below: who can go Live and what the screen shows, the host's switch, what a moderator can and cannot do, the filters that work before the Live starts, pinning, what survives the broadcast, and the viewer's answer, which is shorter than the listicles make it.

Who can go Live, and where the comments sit

Instagram's Live page, read September 17, 2026 as a phone, sets the entry bar in one sentence: "Only Instagram users who have a public account with 1,000 followers or more will be able to start a Live broadcast." It adds that "newly created accounts may not be able to go Live or co-broadcast."

Once you are broadcasting, "the number of viewers appears at the top of the screen and comments appear at the bottom". Everything below is about that bottom strip.

Turn off all comments during a Live

The host's one switch is on the Options sheet. Instagram's words: "To turn comments off, tap Options at the bottom, then tap Turn off commenting." Every comment disappears for every viewer, and the strip goes quiet until you turn commenting back on.

This is the switch behind the message viewers search for. If a Live tells you comments are off, the host threw it; nothing on your side did.

Hide or remove one person's comments

For one account rather than the whole room, Instagram gives the host a moderator. Its moderators page, read September 17, 2026, says: "When you start a live broadcast, you can assign one moderator to manage your viewers and comments. The moderator must be a different account than a co-host and must be tuned into the live in order to be assigned." To assign one: "Tap Options in the top right. Tap Add Moderator."

The moderator's powers are exactly three, on a comment's Options: "Report Comment", "Remove from Live Video to stop an account from seeing the live video. They won't be able to rejoin to view the live video, but can join future live videos", and "Turn Off Commenting to turn off all comments from a specific account. The account will still see their comments appear, but they won't be visible to anyone else."

That last line is the one to remember. The silenced account keeps typing into a void it cannot see, which is why it does not come back angrier.

Keep spam off the Live before it starts

The control that works before anyone comments is the one the listicles skip. Instagram's Live page: "Keep in mind that any keyword filters you've turned on will also apply to comments on your live broadcast." The custom words, phrases, numbers and emojis on your Hidden Words list, and the offensive-words switch that is on by default, all reach the Live.

So the words that land in Lives ("follow for follow", "DM me", a link, a promotion pitch) belong on the list before you go on air; the Hidden Words post has the screens, and bot comments on Instagram has the phrases worth adding.

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Pin the one comment you want everyone to see

The opposite move, one line: "Tap a comment and tap Pin comment to pin it so that viewers can see it more easily." A pinned question keeps the strip useful while the rest scrolls past.

After the Live

Two things happen when you end the broadcast. First, the review: "Once your live broadcast ends, tap Review moderator actions to see the actions moderators took and take more actions if necessary. From here, you can: Block a viewer; Remove a viewer as a follower; Hide future live videos from a viewer."

Second, the comments go. Instagram's Live page: "when you save your live broadcast to your profile or download the broadcast from Live Archive, only the broadcast is saved, and not things like comments, likes and viewers." There is no hidden list to unhide from, because there is no list.

As a viewer, can you hide the comments?

Not by any control Instagram documents. As of September 17, 2026, its Live pages describe the host's Turn off commenting, the moderator's three actions and the pin, and nothing for a viewer who wants someone else's comment strip out of the way. The forty-a-month "can't see comments on Instagram Live" searches are the same fact from the other side: if the strip is gone, the host turned it off.

What a moderation tool does, and does not do, for a Live

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Live comments are not among them: as of September 17, 2026 the product reads comments on posts, reels and ads, and this page does not claim more. What it does for a Live is indirect: the words and patterns its rules catch under your posts are the ones to copy into Hidden Words before you broadcast, and the twelve rules are a good list to copy from.

Instagram Live and Facebook Live, side by side

The Instagram column is Instagram's Live help text (September 17, 2026). The Facebook column is deliberately short: Facebook Live has its own chat settings and ban levels, and its own article.

Sources

• Start a live broadcast on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone
• Moderators on Instagram Live, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026, the web screen on my own account September 8, 2026

Below: how to tell which of the four hid the comment, the steps for each in Instagram's words, stories, reels and Live, whether any of it works on a computer, what unhiding changes, and how to hide the wrong comments less often.

Which of the four hid it

Instagram hides comments in four separate ways, and the button that brings one back depends on which it was. You hid it yourself from the comment's menu. Hidden Words hid it because it matched the offensive-words filter or your custom list. Limits hid it because the account was a recent follower or a non-follower while Limits was on. Or the account is restricted, and everything it writes is visible only to itself until you approve it.

The quickest tell: if View hidden comments is at the bottom of the thread, it is one of the first two. If it is not there and the comment came from a new follower during a bad week, it is Limits.

Unhide a comment you hid, or that Hidden Words hid

Instagram's help page, read September 5, 2026, gives the path in three lines: "Go to the post where the comment is hidden. At the bottom of the comment section, tap View hidden comments. Tap Unhide under the comment you wish to unhide."

The same list holds the comments Hidden Words hid, so a customer's "this is a scam, right?" that tripped a word on your list is one tap from being back. If the list keeps catching customers, the fix is the list, not the tap: the Hidden Words post has the three switches and the custom list.

Unhide a comment from a limited account

Limits hides new comments from the groups you chose, for up to four weeks. Instagram's page on limited comments, read September 17, 2026 as a phone, says: "Tap Comments below your post. Tap Options in the top right, then tap See Limited Comments. Tap Manage button at top right. Tap Select to choose the comments you'd like to manage." Then Approve: "The comment will be visible to you and anyone who can see your post."

One line on that page matters more than the steps: "Any comments made during the time Limits is on will remain hidden when the time you set has ended." Turning Limits off does not unhide what it hid. Every comment it caught in those weeks is still waiting, and a customer who wrote during a pile-on stays invisible until you approve them.

Unhide a restricted account's comment

A restricted account is not hidden as such; its comments are. Instagram's Restrict page, read September 17, 2026: "Their new comments on your posts will only be visible to that person, and you can choose to see the comment by tapping See comment. If you want others to be able to see their comment, you can tap Approve, then tap Approve to confirm."

Approving one comment approves one comment. To stop the next one being held, unrestrict the account from its profile.

Stories, reels and Live

Instagram's unhide steps are written for "your posts" and its help page does not treat reels separately, as of September 5, 2026. Stories are different because a story's comments have their own audience: Instagram's story comments page, read September 17, 2026, says that for a public account "anyone you follow can leave comments on your stories", and "anyone who can see a Story can also see comments". A story comment you do not want is deleted, not hidden, and a story's comment setting is a switch under Story settings, Commenting, Allow comments.

Live is the one place unhiding does not exist. Instagram's Live page, read September 17, 2026, says that when you save or download a broadcast "only the broadcast is saved, and not things like comments, likes and viewers", so a comment hidden during a Live is gone with the Live.

Does any of this work on a computer?

Not the per-post part. As of September 17, 2026, Instagram's steps for View hidden comments, See Limited Comments and Restrict are written for the app, the Limits help page is blank in a computer browser, and Instagram's own note on spam filters reads "Hidden Words preferences for spam are not currently supported on web browsers or Meta Quest". The web version gives you the Hidden Words settings and the custom list; the hidden comments themselves are on your phone.

Turning commenting back on is the one exception that restores comments from anywhere: Instagram's page, read September 5, 2026, says "if you turn commenting back on for a post, previous comments will be restored and people will be able to comment again".

What unhiding changes, and what it never changed

Unhiding makes the comment visible again to everyone who can see the post. It changes nothing for the commenter, because nothing changed for them when it was hidden: Instagram's help page says a manually hidden comment is "only visible to you and the person who made the comment" and that "the commenter won't be able to see that it's been hidden".

The count never moved either. "Hidden comments are still included in your total comment count," the same page says, so a post with 40 comments and 12 hidden showed 40 the whole time. Who can see a hidden comment has the same rule for each platform and each kind of hide.

Hiding the wrong comments less often

On my own Instagram accounts the negativity rule removed two comments between August 1 and September 17, 2026, and rereading them on September 17, one was a customer complaining that support was slow, which I would rather have answered than removed. A rule can be wrong too. The difference that matters is whether you can see what it did on one screen and undo it, instead of hunting through each post's hidden list.

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Its Hidden view lists every comment a rule hid on the account with the rule's name on the row and an Unhide button beside it, so a wrong hide is one click to undo; hide, unhide and undo in the help centre shows the view.

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Sources

• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• View limited comments on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone
• Limit interactions on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone
• Restrict someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Turn commenting on or off for your Instagram post, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• About comments on Instagram stories, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Story comment settings, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone
• Start a live broadcast on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• View, delete or report spam comments on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• My own moderation log, three Instagram accounts, comments published August 1 to September 17, 2026, counted September 17, 2026

Below: the seven shapes with a real example of each, who is sending them and for what money, how to tell a bot from a person, what Meta's own numbers say it catches and misses, what the flood costs, and the way to stop them on Facebook and on Instagram, each of which has its own guide with the screens.

YouTube, TikTok and fan-fiction sites get the same thing. This page covers Facebook and Instagram, the two platforms I run ads on and moderate every day.

The seven shapes of a bot comment

Every example below is from the moderation log of my own Pages and accounts, with the day and the rule that caught it. Names are never printed.

1. A row of emojis. "🥰🥰🥰🥰" under a Facebook ad on September 8, 2026, hidden by the emoji rule. Sixty comments with no letters in them at all arrived on my Pages between August 1 and September 17, from 51 accounts.
2. One word of praise. "Good" four times from four accounts, "Info" three from three, "Awesome 👍😎" on September 15. A word that fits every ad on the platform.
3. The same line from many accounts. One gambling sentence from 36 different accounts in seventeen days, a variant from 30 more. This is the clearest signature there is.
4. A channel or site link with nothing around it. A WhatsApp channel invite under an ad on September 4, caught by the link rule; a shortened link under an Instagram ad on September 13, the same.
5. A "DM me" or a rival's pitch. "Kanzan AI is also good" under a Facebook ad on September 10, "Zaptick is better than all" under an Instagram post on September 2, both competitors, both removed by a custom rule or by hand.
6. Reviews or followers for sale. "5 star positive review available" under an Instagram ad on September 6, caught by a custom rule.
7. A gambling name in bold Unicode. The JANGKAR55, WSO55 and MARKASGG pastes, each spelled in bold mathematical letters so that a plain keyword list misses them, caught by the emoji and hashtag rules on September 10.

An eighth tell rides on all seven: the wrong language. A Bengali Telegram recruitment paste landed under one of my English ads on September 16, and praise in a language your customers do not speak is a bot until proven otherwise.

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Who is sending them, and for what money

Four kinds of sender produce the seven shapes. Scripted accounts, created in batches and driven by software, post the emoji rows, the one-word praise and the copy-pasted lines. People paid per comment, the click farms, post the pitches and the links, and they can pass a "no profile picture" check because a person set the account up. The first two are what my log shows. The other two are the ways a real-looking account ends up posting: engagement pods, groups of real accounts trading generic praise to look popular, and accounts that were taken over and now post whatever their buyer wants.

The money under my ads was gambling sites, WhatsApp and Telegram channels, and sellers of reviews and followers. Meta's spam policy, read September 17, 2026, names the trade in one clause: "selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views, follows, clicks, use of specific hashtags, etc."

Meta's own definition of spam, from its integrity reports, covers both the scripted and the hired kind: "content that is designed to be shared in deceptive and annoying ways or attempts to mislead users to drive engagement. Spam spreads in a number of ways: It can be automated (published by bots or scripts) or coordinated."

Telling a bot from a person in ten seconds

Look at the account first. On Facebook, the signs are the ones Moderation Assist's author criteria name: no profile picture, no friends or followers, an account under a week old, a record of comments hidden or reported. On Instagram, the sign Limits names is the recent follower, "accounts that have started following you in the last week", and the empty grid tells the rest.

Then look at the comment. Does it relate to the post, or would it fit under any post? Is the same text under your other posts, from other names? Is there a link, a brand, a "DM me"? Is it in a language your customers use?

A person fails one of these at most. A bot fails the account checks and the comment checks together, and that is the ten-second call.

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Why Meta does not catch them all

Meta catches a great deal. Its fake-accounts report, read September 17, 2026, estimates that "less than 5% of our worldwide daily active people" in the first two quarters of 2026 "consisted solely of violating accounts", and its integrity reports, read September 6, 2026, say that "at the end of H1 2026, global enforcement precision averaged around 91% on Facebook and around 92% on Instagram".

The gap is in the policy's own words. Meta acts against accounts posting "at very high frequencies", and "may place restrictions on accounts that are acting at lower frequencies when other indicators of Spam (e.g., posting repetitive content) or signals of inauthenticity are present". A farm that posts one comment per account, from 36 accounts, is acting at a low frequency 36 times, and the comments are under your ad while Meta decides.

Five percent of a very large number is still a large number, and a precision figure describes what Meta removed, not what it left. What it leaves is yours to handle.

What bot comments cost

The seventeen days from September 1, 2026 brought 622 comments to my three Facebook Pages, 576 of them under ads, and 489 had to go. Instagram, over a longer window from August 1, holds 21 comments in the same log, 17 removed, with the two bot pitches under ads. The bots go where the paid audience is.

Removing one comment by hand on Facebook is three taps, so 489 comments is 1,467 taps in seventeen days before reading a word. The cost I cannot count is the prospect who opens the comments on an ad, sees a gambling paste or a review for sale at the top, and closes the ad with an opinion of the business that no headline will change.

Stopping them on Facebook, and on Instagram

The two platforms give you different tools, and only the table below puts them side by side. On Facebook, Moderation Assist judges the account (no picture, no friends, days old, reported before), the Keywords list takes the pasted words and their spellings, and the Blocking list bans an account from the whole Page; the Facebook procedure has each screen and where it stops.

On Instagram there are no author criteria and no Page-level block list. Hidden Words hides the phrases you add and the offensive ones by default, Limits hides new comments from recent followers or non-followers for up to four weeks, Restrict makes an account's comments visible only to itself, Select multiple comments deletes up to 25 at once, and Block removes the account's comments outright; the Instagram procedure walks through all five.

One rule set that covers both platforms

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. The rule set below is the one on the account in the screen, and it maps onto the seven shapes: the Emojis rule for shape one (Hide, because some are people), the Keywords rule set to Delete with the pasted words and gambling names for shapes two, three and seven, the URLs rule set to Delete with your own domain allowed for shape four, and one Custom topics rule in plain words for shapes five and six ("anyone selling their own product or telling people to DM them for a deal"); the twelve rules and hide or delete per rule are in the help centre.

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Each shape and the control that catches it

The Facebook cells come from Facebook's help pages (read between September 5 and 17, 2026), the Instagram cells from Instagram's (September 5 and 17). A cell that says "no" means the help pages document nothing for that shape.

Hide, delete or block, by shape

Delete the copy-pasted lines, the gambling pastes, the sale pitches and the bare links: no person is behind them and nothing is lost. Block the account on either platform when it comes back, and on Instagram blocking also removes what it already posted.

Hide the emoji rows and the one-word praise, because a real customer sends those too, and a hidden comment can be brought back after a look. The "DM me" from an account with a real grid or a real friends list is the one to read before deciding.

Sources

• Spam, Meta Community Standards, read September 17, 2026
• Fake accounts, Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook, read September 17, 2026
• Integrity reports, first half of 2026, Meta Transparency Center, read September 6, 2026
• Integrity reports, second half of 2026, Meta Transparency Center, read September 6, 2026
• About Moderation Assist, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Comments marked as spam on a Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 10, 2026
• Manage comment moderation and blocking on your Facebook Page, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Block certain words from appearing in comments on your Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Limit interactions on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Restrict someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Manage multiple comments on your Instagram posts, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• What happens when you block someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• My own moderation log, three Facebook Pages and three Instagram accounts, comments published August 1 to September 17, 2026, counted September 17, 2026

Below: the emoji comments from my own ads and what gave them away, why a bot chooses an emoji over words, the emoji comments that are customers, the Facebook steps, the Instagram steps, a rule that reads the whole comment, and whether to hide or delete.

If you came here for emojis to paste into a comment, this is the other page: the one about the emoji comments you did not ask for.

The emoji comments that are bots, from my own ads

Since August 1, 2026, the emoji rule on my three Facebook Pages has hidden 102 comments, 100 of them under ads. Sixty of those comments contained no letter or digit at all, "🥰🥰🥰🥰" under an ad on September 8 among them, and the sixty came from 51 different accounts.

The second shape puts a name between the emojis. On September 3 a comment under one of my ads read as a brand name followed by a black heart, a wing, a money bag, a flag and a ninja, and nothing else. The emojis are the decoration; the name is the advert.

The third is the gambling paste, which is where emoji comments and bot comments on Facebook meet. The same sentence with a gambling brand wrapped in emojis arrived from 36 accounts, and a variant from 30 more, each spelled slightly differently in Unicode so that an exact-match list would miss it.

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Why a bot posts an emoji instead of words

A word can be filtered. Every keyword list on Facebook and Instagram matches text, and a comment with no text matches nothing, so four hearts sail through a list that would have caught "dm me". The account gets a comment on your ad, the comment counts, and no rule fires.

An emoji also reads as a reaction. To a prospect scrolling the thread, "🔥🔥🔥" looks like a fan, and to the ad's own counters it is engagement. A farm that sells engagement can post it under any ad in any language without reading the ad.

Meta's spam policy (my reading of September 17, 2026) names the tell without naming emojis. It says Meta "may place restrictions on accounts that are acting at lower frequencies when other indicators of Spam (e.g., posting repetitive content) or signals of inauthenticity are present". The same four emojis under every ad from an account with no posts is repetitive content from an inauthentic account, and it is still under your ad until you act.

The emoji comments that are customers

Not every heart is a bot, and the rule that hides them all would hide the good ones. On September 15 a comment under one of my ads read "Awesome 👍😎". The emoji rule caught it, and it is the case for a review pass: a rule that fires on any emoji will catch a person now and then, which is why it should hide rather than delete.

Three things separate a customer's emoji from a farm's. The account has a history: posts, friends or followers, a profile picture. The comment relates to the post: a heart under a launch, a "🙏" after you replied to them. And it happens once, not the same four emojis under every ad you run.

A one-word rule for the doubtful ones: an emoji comment from an account you can recognise as a person is a comment; one from an account you cannot is a signal.

What a row of emojis does to an ad

The visible cost is small and the hidden one is time. A row of emoji-only comments pushes your customers' questions down the thread, and every one of them has to be read to be judged. Since August 1 that judging was 102 comments on my Pages, and 39 more comments that carried emojis were removed by hand.

The count does not drop when you hide. Instagram's help page says "hidden comments are still included in your total comment count", and Facebook's says the profiles that created a hidden comment "and their friends will still be able to see the hidden comments". Hiding cleans the thread a prospect reads and leaves the number the algorithm reads alone.

How to hide emoji comments on Facebook

Facebook treats an emoji as a keyword. Both of its word lists take one, and the same list appears in both places.

1. Add the emoji to Keywords in Moderation Assist. In the Professional dashboard, open Moderation Assist, click Add, choose Keywords in comments, and type or pick the emoji. The screen says new comments "that contain your chosen words, phrases, or emojis will be hidden", and that existing comments "won't be affected and must be hidden manually". The limit is 1,000 keywords.

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2. Or add it in the Page's own list. As of September 17, 2026, Facebook's help page gives the Page path: the Page photo, Settings and privacy, Settings, Followers and public content, then Hide comments containing certain words from your Page. To add an emoji, "click Emoji, then select the emoji that you want to block". Facebook hides variations of a keyword automatically, and notes that the commenter "and their friends will still be able to see the hidden comments".

What the list cannot do is the part that matters. It hides comments containing the emojis you named, one emoji at a time, and nothing in it means "a comment made only of emojis". Add the heart and you hide every customer's heart too, so on Facebook the honest choice is to list the emojis that only appear in spam (the money bag, the flag runs, the gambling brand's own decorations) and leave the hearts to a review pass.

How to hide emoji comments on Instagram

Instagram has two switches and a list, and only the list takes an emoji you choose.

1. Add the emoji to Hidden Words. On the web, click More, then Settings, then Hidden Words under How others can interact with you, then Manage custom words and phrases. Instagram's help page, read September 5, 2026, says to "enter specific words, phrases, numbers or emojis you want to hide in the text box", separated by commas, and click Submit.
2. Leave Hide unwanted comments on. It is on by default and hides comments "containing common offensive words, phrases, or emojis that are likely to be abusive or mean". It does nothing about hearts and flames, because they are not offensive, and the help page does not say which emojis it considers offensive.

The same limit applies as on Facebook: the list hides the exact emojis you add, and there is no setting for "only emojis". Instagram's help page adds one comfort that Facebook's does not: "when a comment or message is hidden, the person who sent it won't know". The rest of Instagram's comment tools are in the Hidden Words post.

A rule for the whole comment, not a list of emojis

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Its Emojis rule fires on any comment that contains an emoji, so the 102 comments above were hidden as they arrived, and the whitelist keeps a comment with a word you name ("love", your product's name) visible whatever emoji it carries; set to Hide as in the screen below, the "Awesome 👍😎" kind is one click from being back, and the twelve rules and the whitelist are in the help centre.

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Facebook and Instagram emoji controls compared

The Facebook column is Facebook's own help text (September 5 and 17, 2026), the Instagram column is Instagram's (September 5, 2026).

Hide or delete?

Hide. An emoji comment is the one kind of spam that might be a person, a hidden comment can be brought back, and on both platforms the sender is not told. Delete when you have already identified the wave: the same four emojis from dozens of accounts that appeared the same hour, or a gambling brand dressed in hearts, where nothing is lost and the thread is clean sooner.

Whichever you choose, do it on the ad, not only on the Page. The wave under my ads was 100 comments and the one under my posts was 2, and every control above covers ads only when the help page says so: Facebook's Keywords hide comments "on your Page, profile or ads that you run", and Meta's advertiser guidance says the Page and account filters "extend to ads from the Page or account".

Sources

• Block certain words from appearing in comments on your Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• About Moderation Assist, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026, the Keywords screen tried on my own profile September 8, 2026
• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Spam, Meta Community Standards, read September 17, 2026
• Manage comments on your ads, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• My own moderation log, three Facebook Pages and one Instagram account, comments published August 1 to September 17, 2026, counted September 17, 2026

Below: what a bot comment looks like on Instagram, why it is there, how to tell one from a person, what it costs an advertiser, the five tools with their screens and their limits, and the rule I would run on an account that gets them daily.

If you searched this to run a comment bot, nine of the other results will oblige. This page is for the account on the receiving end.

What a bot comment looks like on Instagram

Seven shapes cover almost all of it. Generic praise that fits any photo ("Nice pic", "Great content"). A row of the same emoji. An offer to promote your account or sell you followers, ending in "DM me". A review-selling pitch. A shortened link with nothing around it. The same sentence under every post you publish. And praise in a language your followers do not speak.

The ones that reached my own accounts were the pitches. On September 6, 2026 a comment under one of my Instagram ads read "5 star positive review available", and on September 13 another under an ad was a shortened link and the words "This is Link". A custom rule caught the first and the link rule caught the second before I saw either.

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Why bots comment on Instagram at all

Most of it is follower farming. A comment on your post puts the bot's account in front of you and everyone who reads your comments, and a share of them tap the name and follow back. The rest is selling: reviews, promotion, followers, whatever the "DM me" leads to.

Meta's spam policy, in my reading of September 17, 2026, forbids both halves. It does not allow "engaging with content or creating accounts, Groups, Pages, Events or other assets, either manually or automatically, at very high frequencies", and it names the trade: "selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views, follows, clicks, use of specific hashtags, etc."

That trade is also why this search is full of sellers. A bot that comments on other people's posts is the product; your comment section is where it is delivered.

How to tell a bot from a person on Instagram

Open the profile. A bot account usually has no posts or a handful of stock ones, a follower count far below its following count, a sign-up date you can guess from the empty grid, and the same comment on other accounts' posts if you look at what it has liked or commented on lately.

Then read the comment against the post. A person reacts to something in the picture or the caption; a bot's line would fit under any post on Instagram. "Love this!" under a photo of a broken espresso machine is a bot.

Two of these checks failing is a bot; one is a stranger.

What bot comments cost an account or an advertiser

Under an ad, a bot comment sits where your prospects read. "5 star positive review available" under a paid post tells a stranger that your reviews might be bought, and a review-selling pitch under a coffee ad is worse for the coffee than for the seller. That is the real cost, and it is not in any dashboard.

My own count is small and I will not inflate it. Between August 1 and September 17, 2026 my three Instagram accounts received 21 comments, 17 of which were removed, and the two bot-style ones both sat under ads. On the same Pages' Facebook side the September count was 622; the platforms are not the same problem at the same scale, which is why bot comments on Facebook is its own article.

How to stop bot comments on Instagram

Five steps, in the order I would set them up on an account that gets bots daily. The first four are Instagram's own, and each one is documented on a different help page; the dates are when I read them.

1. Turn on Hidden Words, and add your own words. On the web, click More, then Settings, then Hidden Words under How others can interact with you. Leave Hide comments on (it is on by default), and under Manage custom words and phrases add the phrases bots use: "DM me", "promote your page", "positive review", the names of the sellers that keep appearing. Instagram's page, read September 5, 2026, says the list takes "specific words, phrases, numbers or emojis" separated by commas.

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2. Turn on Limits for recent followers and accounts that do not follow you. In the app, open your profile, tap the menu, then Limit interactions under How others can interact with you. Choose who is limited: "Recent followers (accounts that have started following you in the last week)" and accounts that don't follow you. Instagram's page, read September 17, 2026, says you can limit "for up to four weeks at a time and can extend the time for as long as you'd like", and that limited accounts "can still comment on your posts and reels but their comments will be hidden unless you approve them".

3. Restrict the accounts that keep coming back. Tap and hold the comment, then tap Restrict. From then on, Instagram says, "their new comments on your posts will only be visible to that person", you see them by tapping See comment, and you can Approve one if it turns out to be a customer. You stop getting notifications for that account too.

4. Clear the backlog with Select multiple comments. Under the post, tap Comments, then Options in the top right, then Select multiple comments. Select the bot comments and choose Hide comments, Delete comments or Block accounts at the bottom. Instagram's page, read September 17, 2026, says "you can delete up to 25 comments at a time", so a long thread takes a few rounds.

5. Let a rule do it on every post and ad. CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. On the Instagram account in the screen below, one Custom topics rule written in plain words ("anyone selling their own coffee or telling people to DM them for a deal") hides the review, promotion and cheaper-beans pitches as they arrive, and the URL rule takes the bare links; how to write one is in the custom topics guide, and bulk hide or delete takes a backlog longer than 25.

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What Instagram's tools do not catch

Limits only hides, and only for the groups you name. An account that followed you two weeks ago is not a recent follower any more, and a bot that follows you first walks through the non-followers gate. Instagram also notes that "comments made by limited accounts will remain hidden after you turn off this tool", so the approvals are yours to do.

Hidden Words needs the words. "Great content, DM me" is on the list only if you put "DM me" there, and the sellers change their phrasing faster than a list changes.

Select multiple comments stops at 25 per round, and Limits and bulk select live in the app: Instagram's help pages for both, as of September 17, 2026, describe phone steps only, and the Limits page shows nothing to a computer browser at all.

Turning comments off is the last resort and not the answer: Instagram's page says "when you turn off commenting, any comments that are currently on your post will be hidden", customers' included.

Instagram and Facebook bot controls, side by side

The Instagram column is Instagram's help text (September 5 and 17, 2026), the Facebook column is Facebook's (September 5 to 17, 2026). The Facebook procedure is in its own article.

Hide, delete or block a bot comment?

Delete the comment and block the account. Instagram's block page says "people aren't notified when you block them", their existing comments are removed from your posts, and the block reaches the other accounts they hold. Nothing is lost, because nothing a bot wrote was worth keeping.

Hide, or Restrict, when the profile might be a person: a real name, a grid with photos, a comment that mentions your product. A restricted account's next comment waits for your approval, which is the right amount of doubt for a "how much?" from a stranger. And whichever you choose, do it under the ads first, because that is where the two bot pitches on my accounts landed.

Sources

• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026, the web screens on my own account September 8, 2026
• Limit interactions on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone (the page shows nothing to a computer)
• Restrict someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Manage multiple comments on your Instagram posts, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026 as a phone
• Block someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• What happens when you block someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Who can comment on my Instagram posts, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Turn commenting on or off for your Instagram post, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Spam, Meta Community Standards, read September 17, 2026
• About Moderation Assist, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026 (the Facebook column of the table)
• Manage comment moderation and blocking on your Facebook Page, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026 (the Facebook column of the table)
• My own moderation log, three Instagram accounts, comments published August 1 to September 17, 2026, counted September 17, 2026

Below: what a bot comment looks like under a real ad, why they arrive at all, five signs that give a bot away in ten seconds, what the flood cost me in September, each control with its screen, and where Facebook's own tools stop.

One thing this page is not: a guide to running a comment bot. If that is the search you meant, Meta's spam policy is the only reading you need, and it is quoted below.

What a bot comment looks like under a Facebook ad

The clearest signature is one sentence, many accounts. Between September 1 and 17, 2026, the same 70-character gambling line in bold Unicode letters arrived under my ads from 36 different accounts, and a second gambling line from 30 more. Thirty-six accounts and thirty-six comments: each account posted once and did not return.

The second signature is the one-word paste. In the same seventeen days "Hi" came 7 times from 5 accounts, "How" 4 times from 4, "Good" 4 from 4, "Info" 3 from 3, and the Arabic word for "details" 11 times from 10 accounts. A person asks a question. A bot leaves a word that fits every ad on Facebook.

The third is a link with nothing around it: a WhatsApp channel invite, a Telegram bot, a referral address. On September 4 a WhatsApp channel link landed under one of my ads and was caught by the link rule before I saw it. Bold Unicode letters are a signature on their own, since they exist to slip past keyword lists that read plain text.

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Why bots comment under ads and Page posts at all

An ad is a paid audience. Whoever is running the bot gets that audience for nothing by leaving a comment under it, and the comment stays up until you remove it. Under my ads the payloads were gambling sites, WhatsApp channels and referral links, and the six patterns are catalogued in the spam patterns post.

Meta's spam policy, read on September 17, 2026, forbids the behaviour twice over. It does not allow "engaging with content or creating accounts, Groups, Pages, Events or other assets, either manually or automatically, at very high frequencies", and it names the trade behind the pastes: "selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views, follows, clicks, use of specific hashtags, etc."

The account-integrity policy adds the account itself. Meta forbids "creating or using an account or other entity through automated means, such as scripting", and its enforcement report estimated that "less than 5% of our worldwide daily active people" in the first two quarters of 2026 "consisted solely of violating accounts". Five percent of a very large number is what lands under your ad.

Five signs of a bot, and the Facebook criterion behind each

Facebook's Moderation Assist judges the person commenting on five criteria, and each one is a sign you can read yourself. Open the commenter's profile and you have the first two in a second.

1. No profile picture. A bought account rarely gets one. Facebook's criterion: "Doesn't have a profile picture".
2. No friends or followers. The account exists to comment, not to be seen. Facebook's: "Doesn't have any friends or followers".
3. Days old. Facebook's criterion: an account "less than 1 week old".
4. You have removed it before. Facebook's fourth criterion is an account that "has had at least 3 comments reported, deleted or hidden by an admin in the past 30 days". If a name in your hidden list rings a bell, that is the sign.
5. The comment fits every ad on Facebook. A one-word "Info", praise in a language your customers do not speak, a gambling name under a coffee ad. Facebook's fifth criterion, "may be using a fake identity", is its own judgement of the same thing; you cannot see the signal, but you can see the mismatch.

A real customer fails at most one of these. A bot fails three.

What 489 deleted comments cost me in September 2026

Between September 1 and 17, 2026, my three Facebook Pages received 622 comments. 576 of them sat under ads, and 489 were deleted, most by a rule before anyone read them. That is 79% of everything that arrived.

Deleting one comment by hand on Facebook is three taps: the comment's menu, Delete, confirm. For 489 comments that is 1,467 taps in seventeen days, on top of reading each one to decide. The cost that matters more is the one I cannot count: a prospect who opens the comments on an ad and finds a gambling paste at the top has already decided what kind of business runs it.

How to stop bot comments on Facebook

Five steps, in the order I would run them on a new Page. The first two are Facebook's own and cost nothing; the fifth is the one that runs on every ad without you.

1. Turn on Moderation Assist's author criteria. Open the Professional dashboard, choose Moderation Assist, click Add, and under Choose criteria add the rows about the person commenting. On my profile on September 8, 2026 the dialog offered four (no friends or followers, new profile, no profile picture, repeat offender), and the help page lists a fifth, "may be using a fake identity"; each one hides matching new comments "on your Page, profile or ads that you run".

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2. Add the words and patterns bots paste. In the same list, Keywords in comments takes up to 1,000 words, phrases and emojis, and Facebook says it catches spellings such as "tr33" and "t.r.e.e". Put in the gambling names, the "dm me" and "whatsapp me" phrases, and any brand that keeps appearing under your ads and is not yours.

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3. Hide or delete what is already there. Moderation Assist "only hides comments made after you create the criteria", so the backlog is yours. On the post, hover over Options next to the comment and click Hide comment, or click Options and select Delete. A hidden comment "will still be visible to the person who wrote it and their friends" and to nobody else.

4. Ban the account from the Page. Click the Page's profile picture, then Settings & privacy, Settings, Blocking. Under Block users click Edit, choose Add users to blocked list, type the name and click Block. The account can no longer comment on anything the Page publishes.

5. Let a rule do it on every ad and post. CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Under my ads since August 1, 2026 the link rule has taken 139 comments and the emoji rule 100 before anyone read them, and a Keywords rule set to Delete takes a gambling name the moment it appears; the twelve rules and Post cleanup for the backlog are in the help centre.

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What Moderation Assist does not catch

The author criteria read the account, so a bought aged account with a picture, a few hundred friends and a clean month passes all five. The gambling wave under my ads was caught by its text, not its author, and a keyword list is what stopped it.

It hides only new comments. Every criterion is a hide, never a delete, and nothing on the screen touches the comments that were there before you added it.

It is set up on one Page or profile at a time. The help page describes the effect as comments "on your Page, profile or ads that you run", so a second Page needs its own criteria.

A hidden comment is not gone. Its author can still read it, and so can that account's friends, which is fine for a bot and less fine for a person, and the rule that decides between the two is in the post on who sees a hidden comment.

Facebook and Instagram bot controls, side by side

The two platforms give a Page and an account different tools, and only the table puts them next to each other. Every Facebook cell comes from Facebook's help pages read on September 5 to 17, 2026, every Instagram cell from Instagram's read on September 5 and 17.

The Instagram half is a different procedure with different screens, and it gets its own article.

Hide or delete?

Delete. A bot comment has no customer behind it, nothing to reply to, and no goodwill to lose, and a hidden one stays visible to the account that posted it and to its friends, which for a bot means the next bot. Hide is for the case where the account might be a person: a one-word "Info" from a profile with a picture and a history deserves a reply, not a deletion.

If a bot comment survives a day under an ad, delete the comment, block the account from the Page, and then report the profile so Meta's fake-account enforcement sees it too. The report does nothing for your ad today; the delete does.

Sources

• Spam, Meta Community Standards, read September 17, 2026
• Account integrity and authentic identity, Meta Community Standards, read September 17, 2026
• Fake accounts, Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook, read September 17, 2026
• About Moderation Assist, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026, tried on my own profile September 8, 2026
• Manage comment moderation and blocking on your Facebook Page, Meta Business Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Hide a comment from a post on your Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Delete a comment from a post on your Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 9, 2026
• Comments marked as spam on a Facebook Page, Facebook Help Centre, read September 10, 2026
• Hidden Words on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 5, 2026
• Restrict someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• Block someone on Instagram, Instagram Help Centre, read September 17, 2026
• My own moderation log, three Facebook Pages, comments published September 1 to 17, 2026, counted September 17, 2026

Below: where the numbers come from, each pattern with real examples from my ads, the two tricks spammers use on word filters, when they land, and the rule that catches each.

Where the numbers come from

I run Facebook and Instagram ads for my own companies, WhatChimp and GrowthToolkit, at close to $40,000 a month. My four Pages are connected to CommentWatchDog, which I built for this, and it records every comment with what happened to it.

From August 29 to September 10, 822 comments landed under my ads, across 41 ad posts. 727 were deleted, 4 hidden, 91 left visible. The deletions split four ways:

The 205 caught live are the honest sample of what arrives under a running ad: 96 by the URL rule, 32 by the Emojis rule, 30 by Negativity, 19 by a custom topic, 9 by the phone-number rule, 7 by a keyword, 6 by a hashtag, 4 by the image rule, 2 by profanity.

Pattern 1: a phone number and "message me on WhatsApp"

The oldest pattern under an ad, and the most dangerous, because the reader leaves Facebook for a private chat. Under one WhatChimp ad the newest comment on September 8 was a Bengali message asking readers to WhatsApp a number "with your name, age and profession".

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Others from the same two weeks: a "black hat SEO indexing service" at ₹1.8 per URL with a WhatsApp number, a seller of SIM cards for "face to face deal" in two named towns, and a web designer who "can make a functional and client-converting website" with a WhatsApp number in Nigeria's country code. 102 of the deleted comments contained a phone-shaped number.

The rule: Emails and phone numbers, which reads a number however it is spaced or prefixed.

Pattern 2: a link to a channel or a bot

Links were the largest group, 96 of the 205 caught live, and very few were plain websites. 15 were links to a WhatsApp channel ("free signals 👇", "follow the channel") and 24 were Telegram links, one of them a "money game" bot with a referral code in the address.

The rest were affiliate links: a Temu coupon "for your ₦100,000 bundle", a prop-trading site with an affiliate number, a quiz on a hosted app builder.

The rule: URLs, with an allow list for the domains you want to permit, your own site or your store.

Pattern 3: the gambling paste from many accounts

On September 8, between 09:19 and 09:36 my time, six different accounts pasted the same comment under one ad: "SUPER BAGUS #MARKASGG SEMOGA REJEKINYA NULAR BOS" in bold letters with diamond emojis. Indonesian slot-site testimonials came in the same style all fortnight, "LITETOTO", "BIRTOTO", each with a row of fire emojis.

Two things make this pattern hard for a word list. The names change, and the letters are not letters: the text is set in mathematical bold characters, so "𝗟𝗶𝗧𝗘𝗧𝗢𝗧𝗢" shares no character with "litetoto". 29 comments from 21 accounts used that alphabet under my ads and posts. Six accounts pasting one text inside seventeen minutes is the signature of an account farm, and telling that farm from a person is the subject of bot comments on Facebook.

The rules: Hashtags caught the paste, Emojis caught the testimonials, and a custom topic described in plain words ("gambling and betting sites") judges the meaning rather than the spelling.

Pattern 4: a competitor or freelancer pitch

My ads sell WhatsApp software, so the comments pitch WhatsApp software: "Zaptick is better than all", "Bizwaz helps you automate and grow your sales directly on WhatsApp using AI", a psychologist offering, under my ad, to set up appointment booking over WhatsApp for whoever was asking.

"Any Pakistani reseller?" came five times. A "freelance graphic designer" arrived with a portfolio image, which is why the image rule exists.

The rules: a custom topic for "products, services or resellers offered to my customers", and Images for the portfolio replies.

Pattern 5: fake reviews and badges for sale

"5 star positive review available." "I provide 5 star review with guarantee." In Arabic, "we want a blue badge for a business account". Nine of the deleted comments were offers of reviews.

The rules: Keywords for "review" and "badge" under an ad, where nobody asks for either honestly, or a custom topic where the phrasing varies.

Pattern 6: emoji strings and follow-me bait

"Please subscribe here 👉", "Like back", "Fresh and clean 💦 Like back", rows of hearts, and one row of middle fingers. 32 comments went to the Emojis rule, the second largest group. Why a bot posts a row of hearts at all, and the switch on each platform that hides them, is in emoji comments.

That rule is also where my one wrong call of the fortnight sits: a real customer wrote "my account got banned permanently because someone tried logging in with another email 💔", and the heart broke the rule. The Bin keeps every deleted comment with its rule, which is how I found it. A rule on ads is set aggressively; the Bin and the whitelist are what make that safe.

Not spam, but damaging

30 comments went to the Negativity rule and 7 to a keyword: "they are scammers, don't pay them", "estafa", "this is a scam website, I don't recommend it", complaints about a slow agent. Under an ad I delete them, because the ad is bought reach and the comment is read by strangers as the first review.

Under a support post I would not, and I review the Bin for exactly those: a paying customer's complaint belongs in a reply, not in the Bin. The rule is the same; the setting per post type is ads only, posts only or both.

When it lands

Of the 318 comments under my ads deleted as they landed, by a rule, by me or on Facebook's side, 65 arrived between midnight and 6 AM my time, one in five. The gambling paste took seventeen minutes to arrive from six accounts. Facebook's own spam marking hides a comment "shared too often in a short amount of time", and all six still reached my Page.

A person moderating by hand reads the ad in the morning. By then the phone number has been up for eight hours, under an ad that bought impressions all night.

The rule for each pattern

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Its twelve moderation rules map onto the six patterns above: phone numbers, URLs with an allow list, hashtags, emojis, keywords, images, impersonators, and custom topics judged by meaning in any alphabet, each set to hide or delete.

The backlog under an ad that was already running is cleared with Post cleanup, which is where 409 of my 727 deletions came from.

Whatever you use, the two things to insist on are the same as for any deletion: see the comment before it goes, and keep a Bin you can read afterwards. The 💔 comment is why.

Sources

• My own CommentWatchDog data for my four Pages, August 29 to September 10, 2026: every comment under my ads with its rule and outcome; the Bin and a WhatChimp ad in Business Suite, captured September 8 and 9, 2026.
• Facebook Help Center, How to approve a comment on your Facebook post if it's marked as spam (read September 10, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/134035947160858
• Facebook Help Center, Manage comments with Moderation Assist on Facebook (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1753036688579904
• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comments on your ads in Meta Ads Manager (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1129470964230971

Every line below is Meta's own wording, with the page it comes from, and one table to keep them apart.

One table, every case

On Facebook: the author and their friends

Meta's help page on hiding a comment from a Page post: "The comment will still be visible to the person who wrote it and their friends. This can help prevent more unwanted comments. The comment will be hidden for everyone else."

The same page adds that "replies to the comment will also be hidden", and that only a role with Facebook access to the Page can hide, "if you have task access to a Page, you can't hide comments on Page posts."

A profile post works the same way. Meta's page for profiles says the comment "will be hidden for everyone else that you chose to share it with (e.g. friends or public)", and the author and their friends keep seeing it.

That design is why hiding stops repeat comments: the commenter sees nothing change, so there is nothing to argue with or post again. It is also why a hidden scam is still a scam with an audience, the scammer's friends.

Facebook's automatic hides work the same way

Blocked words, the profanity filter and Moderation Assist all end in the same hidden state. Meta's Moderation Assist page is explicit: "The commenter and their friends can still see a comment if Moderation Assist hides it."

The Hidden by this Page view on a post lists them together with the ones you hid yourself. Meta: "You'll also see comments that are automatically hidden by the profanity filter and comments that have words that you chose to block from your Page." That view needs comment ranking switched on, which it is by default.

Meta's page on ad comments says these filters "extend to ads from the Page or account", so a comment hidden under an ad is hidden in exactly this sense, visible to its author and their friends.

The one case where the author is told

Facebook also hides comments on its own and marks them as spam, "if we think it looks suspicious" or "it's been shared too often in a short amount of time". Those are different from your hides in two ways.

The comment "will remain hidden until you decide", with Keep comment or Delete on the post. And if you keep it, "we'll let the person who posted it know." The author, on their side, can click Not spam to ask you to approve it.

On Instagram: only you and the author

Instagram hides comments two ways, and its help page gives each its own sentence.

A comment you hide by hand in the app: "When you manually hide comments, they are only visible to you and the person who made the comment. Other people won't be able to see the comment after it's been hidden and the commenter won't be able to see that it's been hidden."

A comment hidden by the filters under Settings › Hidden Words: on the web the setting reads "Comments that may be offensive will be hidden in a separate section of your posts, reels, lives, videos and channels." The help page adds that "when a comment or message is hidden, the person who sent it won't know."

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Two things Instagram states that Facebook does not. "Hidden comments are still included in your total comment count", so a post buried in hidden spam still shows the inflated number. And "you can only manually hide comments under your own posts", in the app, not on the web; the reverse is View hidden comments › Unhide at the bottom of the comments.

Can the author tell?

Not from a notification, on either platform. On Facebook the author and their friends still see the comment in place; only a look from an account outside that circle would show it missing.

On Instagram, the author sees their comment in place and the count includes it. What they cannot see is the hidden section, which is yours.

What that means for a scam

A hidden comment is the right tool when the comment is rude but harmless: nobody is provoked, and it comes back with one click. A phishing link or an impersonator is still live for the author's friends after a hide, so on my own Pages those are deleted, one by one on Facebook's screens or in bulk.

Between August 29 and September 9, across my four Pages, 1,390 comments came in: 5 hidden, 1,304 deleted. The 5 were rude; the 1,304 were scams, links, phone numbers and pastes.

Hidden with the reason attached

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Each of its twelve moderation rules is set to hide or delete, every hidden comment in the inbox carries the rule that hid it, and unhide is one click.

Who then sees the comment is decided by Facebook and Instagram as above. The tool does not change that, and the commenter is never told.

Sources

• Facebook Help Center, Hide a comment from a post on your Facebook Page (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/297845860255949
• Facebook Help Center, Hide or delete a comment from a post on your Facebook profile (read September 10, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/207042374708584
• Facebook Help Center, How to approve a comment on your Facebook post if it's marked as spam (read September 10, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/134035947160858
• Facebook Help Center, Manage comments with Moderation Assist on Facebook (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1753036688579904
• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comments on your ads in Meta Ads Manager (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1129470964230971
• Instagram Help Center, Hide comments or message requests you don't want to see on Instagram (read September 5, 2026): https://help.instagram.com/700284123459336
• Instagram's Hidden Words settings on the web, my own account, captured September 8, 2026; my own CommentWatchDog Insights, August 29 to September 9, 2026.

Below: what hidden means on an ad, the three manual ways, the three automatic ones, where they stop, and what I do on my own ads.

What a hidden comment on an ad means

Meta's help page on hiding a Page comment: "The comment will still be visible to the person who wrote it and their friends. This can help prevent more unwanted comments. The comment will be hidden for everyone else." Replies are hidden with it.

That design is the point of hiding. The commenter sees nothing change, so there is no argument and no repost; your customers never see the comment. It is also the limit: a scam link stays live for the scammer's friends, which is why deleting is the right call for scams.

Hidden comments are reversible. On the post, the Most relevant menu has a Hidden by this Page view where each one can be unhidden, and the profile can be blocked or reported from there.

Hide one comment: the three places

Meta's page on managing ad comments documents the first; its Page pages document the second; the first page mentions the third.

In Ads Manager

In the Ads tab, under the ad: Edit › ... › More options › Manage Facebook comments. The ad opens with its comments.

On any comment: ... › Hide comment. The same menu offers Report comment; there is no Delete here.

On the ad's post, as your Page

Open the post, then next to the comment: Options › Hide comment. This needs Facebook access to the Page; task access cannot hide comments on Page posts.

From notifications

Meta says the same tools "are also available via Notifications on Facebook and Notifications on Instagram and Threads".

Comments on the Instagram placement of an ad are manageable only if an Instagram account is connected to the Page. An ad run under the Facebook Page identity alone has no Instagram comment view.

Hide automatically with Facebook's own tools

Meta's ad page says you "can also proactively moderate comments on your ads" with word filters, and that these "are set at the Facebook Page, or Instagram and Threads account level, and extend to ads from the Page or account." Three tools qualify.

Blocked words

From your Page: Settings & privacy › Settings › Followers and public content › Public posts › Hide comments containing certain words from your Page.

Add words, phrases or emojis separated by commas and save. A comment containing any of them is hidden as it lands.

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The profanity filter

Same screen: Followers and public content › Hide posts and comments with profanity. Meta's Moderation Assist page lists the languages its profanity list covers: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, Arabic and Russian.

Moderation Assist

In the Professional dashboard, twelve criteria: five about the author (no profile picture, no friends or followers, a new account, a repeat offender, a likely fake identity) and seven about the comment (a link, a link to a specific site, an image, a video, keywords with their spellings, profanity, likely spam). Meta says a matching comment is hidden "on your Page, profile or ads that you run".

I tested every criterion on my own Page; the full walkthrough is in Moderation Assist on Facebook: what it hides and what it leaves to you.

Where Facebook's hiding stops on ads

• Words, not meaning. A blocked word catches the spelling you typed. "Total scam, they never deliver" contains no link, no profanity and no blocked word unless you thought of it.
• New comments only. Every automatic tool starts from the moment it is switched on. The 124 comments already under a running ad are untouched.
• Hide, never delete. Twelve Moderation Assist criteria and two filters end in the same action, and a hidden scam is still a scam with an audience.
• One Page at a time. The lists and switches belong to a Page. Three Pages and two Instagram accounts mean five setups that never share a word.

Some advertisers now see a comment control in Ads Manager that switches comments off for an ad. Meta's help page does not document it as of September 2026, and where it exists it also removes the questions and the social proof the ad was buying, which is why the honest advice stays: control the comments, do not silence them (why most advertisers cannot turn comments off).

What I do on my own ads: hide little, delete a lot

I run Facebook and Instagram ads for my own companies, WhatChimp and GrowthToolkit. Between August 29 and September 9, across my four Pages, 1,390 comments came in: 80 left visible, 5 hidden, 1,304 deleted.

That split is deliberate. A scam, a phishing link, an impersonation or a competitor's link is deleted, because hiding leaves it live for the author's friends. Hiding is for the comment that is rude but harmless, where I might want a second look; it comes back with one click.

Hide or delete on every ad, by rule

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Its twelve moderation rules run on every new comment under every ad and dark post: links, phone numbers, keywords, impersonators, profanity, and negativity or custom topics judged by meaning in any language, each rule set to hide or delete, on ads only, posts only or both.

Every hidden comment shows the rule that hid it, and unhide is one click. The commenter is never notified either way; that part is Facebook's.

Sources

• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comments on your ads in Meta Ads Manager (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1129470964230971
• Facebook Help Center, Hide a comment from a post on your Facebook Page (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/297845860255949
• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comment moderation for Facebook Pages (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/845417592621623
• Facebook Help Center, Manage comments with Moderation Assist on Facebook (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1753036688579904
• My own Page settings and Moderation Assist, captured September 8, 2026; my own CommentWatchDog Insights, August 29 to September 9, 2026.

A backlog of hundreds is cleared one by one, or with a tool that reads the ad's comments through Meta's API and deletes the flagged ones in one action.

Below: what sits under one of my ads and what it costs, hide against delete, where the comments on an ad actually live, the steps for one comment, and the way to do hundreds.

What sits under an ad, and what it costs

I run Facebook and Instagram ads for my own companies, WhatChimp and GrowthToolkit. This is WhatChimp's account alone in July 2026: $40,724.58 spent, 41,329,379 impressions at a $0.99 CPM.

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Every one of those impressions shows the comments under the ad. The ad at the top of this post is one of them: 4,666 reactions and 124 comments since June 28, and on September 8 its two newest comments were a phone-number scam in Bengali asking readers to message a WhatsApp number with their name, age and profession, and an earn-money scam in French, "activation only 4500 FCFA".

A furniture store owner on r/FacebookAds counted "10-15 spam comments on every $500 ad spend". A DTC apparel brand owner put the effect at "jacking up my CPMs by like 18% and scaring off real buyers". The comments are the first review a stranger reads under your ad, and a scammer wrote it.

Hide or delete: which one for spam

Facebook's two removals do different things, and the difference decides which you want for a scam.

Meta's help page on hiding says a hidden comment "will still be visible to the person who wrote it and their friends", which "can help prevent more unwanted comments". That is the right tool for a rude but harmless comment: the author does not notice, and does not post it again.

A scam is different. A phishing link that stays visible to the scammer's friends is still a phishing link with an audience, and an account impersonating your brand is still impersonating it to someone. For those, delete.

Where the comments on an ad actually are

An ad's comments live in three places, and only one of them has Delete.

1. Ads Manager. In the Ads tab, under the ad: Edit › ... › More options › Manage Facebook comments. On each comment: ... › Hide comment or Report comment.
2. Notifications. Meta says the same tools "are also available via Notifications on Facebook and Notifications on Instagram and Threads".
3. The ad's post, as your Page. This is where Delete is. Next to the comment: Options › Delete.

Only Facebook access to the Page can do any of this. Meta's page is explicit that task access "can't hide, sort or delete comments on Page posts".

Instagram comments on an ad are manageable only if an Instagram account is connected; an ad run under your Facebook Page identity has none. Threads replies need a Threads profile the same way.

Delete one comment on a Facebook ad

Three taps, from Meta's page:

1. Open the ad's post as your Page. A boosted post is on your Page already; for an ad made in Ads Manager, open the ad's preview and follow it to the post.
2. Next to the comment: Options › Delete.
3. Confirm if Facebook asks. The comment is removed from the post, and the author is told nothing.

Meta's words: the comment is "removed from the post". If you want the same account gone for good, Meta's page adds: "You can block the profile or Page that made the comment by going directly to the profile or Page."

At 124 comments that loop, read, decide, three taps, next, is an hour. At the pace a working ad attracts comments, it never ends, and the scam that landed at 2 AM stays up until you sit down.

Why there is no "delete all"

Meta's page for ad comments describes actions on a comment, one at a time. Its page for deleting from a Page post does the same. Neither describes selecting several comments and acting on them together, and I have not found one on the screens.

Meta's automation does not close the gap either. Moderation Assist offers twelve criteria, and every one ends in the same action: the comment is hidden, never deleted, and only new comments are covered.

The profanity filter and blocked words work the same way and, per Meta, "extend to ads from the Page or account". Nothing Meta ships deletes, and nothing it ships touches the comments that are already there.

Delete in bulk: the whole ad in one action

The way through is Meta's API, which is what a moderation tool uses. CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. In its Post cleanup you paste the ad's link, every comment and reply loads, you filter to the flagged ones (links, phone numbers, keywords, impersonators, or your own search) and delete them in one action. A long run continues in the background and emails you when it is done; loading, browsing and filtering a post are free.

The same twelve moderation rules can then delete, not just hide, each new comment that matches, so the next scam never has an audience (hide or delete, per rule).

That is how my own backlog went. Between August 29, when I connected my four Pages, and September 9, 1,390 comments passed through: 80 left visible, 5 hidden, 1,304 deleted. 969 of the deletions were cleanup sweeps of old posts and ads, 45 sweeps over 31 posts; the other 335 were deleted live, as they landed.

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The Bin keeps every deleted comment with the rule that deleted it, so a mistake can be found. The newest six on my WhatChimp Page are one gambling hashtag pasted by six different accounts inside two hours, each deleted by the hashtag rule the moment it landed.

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Whatever tool you use, two things to insist on: it should show you the comments before it acts, and it should hide by default and delete only where you say so. Deleting is the one action on this page you cannot undo.

Sources

• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comments on your ads in Meta Ads Manager (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1129470964230971
• Facebook Help Center, Delete a comment from a post on your Facebook Page (read September 9, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/841213946569182
• Facebook Help Center, Hide a comment from a post on your Facebook Page (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/help/297845860255949
• Facebook Help Center, Manage comments with Moderation Assist on Facebook (read September 5, 2026): https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1753036688579904
• Advertisers quoted, verbatim, from public threads read September 3, 2026: r/FacebookAds https://www.reddit.com/comments/1okwgf1, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1ogttv1
• My own Ads Manager for WhatChimp, July 1 to 31, 2026; a WhatChimp ad in Business Suite, captured September 8, 2026; my own CommentWatchDog Insights and Bin, captured September 9, 2026.

Below: what sat under one of my ads this week, what it did to my own results over the last year, what other advertisers say, and what Meta reports.

What lands under a real ad

This is one of my WhatChimp ads in Meta Business Suite on September 8, 2026: 4,666 reactions and 124 comments since June 28. The two newest comments were a phone-number scam in Bengali, asking readers to message a WhatsApp number with their name, age and profession, and an earn-money scam in French, "activation only 4500 FCFA".

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Under each, Facebook offers Reply, See translation and Hide. That is the manual loop: read, translate, decide, hide, next. At 124 comments it is an hour. At the pace a working ad attracts them, it never ends. Most of those comments are not people at all; the seven shapes they take are laid out in bot comments.

What spam did to my own ads

I have run Facebook and Instagram ads for my own companies, WhatChimp and GrowthToolkit, for close to three years: about $40,000 a month now, around $500,000 in the last year alone.

Over the last year one pattern repeated itself many times. The moment spam under an ad picked up, the quality of the leads it brought in dropped. My reading is that the engagement from those accounts pulls the ad's delivery toward people who are nothing like my customers.

Each time I cleaned the comments out, return on ad spend jumped. What did not hold was doing that by hand, every day, under every ad. That gap is why I started building internal tools for it in February 2026, and those tools became CommentWatchDog.

The comments arrive faster than anyone can read them

A small business owner spending about $3,000 a month on Facebook ads put it plainly: "they're letting scammers use MY ad space to run THEIR scams." The same advertiser listed what showed up: "'I won an iPhone!' comments from fake profiles. Crypto bots posting referral links."

A furniture store owner saw comments "filled with 'SCAM COMPANY' and 'THEY STOLE MY MONEY' from obvious bot accounts", and counted "10-15 spam comments on every $500 ad spend."

Scale is the recurring theme:

• a DTC apparel brand owner on r/FacebookAds: "100+ comments a day"
• an agency account manager: "about an hour a day scouring my ads for stuff like this"
• an advertiser running a two-day local hiring ad: "Not 1 real comment lol"

The cost shows up in the numbers

That DTC apparel brand owner connected the comments to ad performance directly: "trolls, scams, random hate popping up under every post, it's jacking up my CPMs by like 18% and scaring off real buyers."

Another advertiser described one comment left up overnight: "saw a sketchy 'is this a scam??' comment stay up all night. Totally dragged down the numbers." And the pattern that follows: "Sometimes one bad comment, leads to many others following."

Real buyers read the comments as a verdict on you

The furniture store owner again: "Real customers asking 'is this legit?' because of the chaos."

A clean product and an honest seller still lose the sale when the comments underneath make the ad look like one more scam. The comments are the first review a stranger reads, and a spammer just wrote it.

Meta's own figures

Meta publishes enforcement numbers twice a year now, an H1 2026 report on March 19, 2026 and an H2 2026 report on August 27, 2026.

• H2 2026 report: "So far this year we've removed 65 million scam ads from Facebook and Instagram, with 94% of those ads removed before anyone reported them to us."
• H1 2026 report: "In 2025, we removed over 159 million scam ads, 92% of which we took down before anyone reported them."
• Precision, Meta's own measure of over-enforcement: "At the end of H1 2026, global enforcement precision averaged around 91% on Facebook and around 92% on Instagram."

Those are ads Meta caught. What advertisers describe above is what still reaches the comments under a live ad. And at 91 to 92% precision, some of what Meta actions is not a violation, and by the same logic some violations are missed.

The same people write to the Page owner

Spam under the ad is one side. My Page's Business Suite inbox held four messages in a row from accounts warning that the Page "has been flagged for serious violations" and would be "severely restricted or permanently deleted" unless verified immediately, in Spanish and French, each with an attachment Facebook had already marked unavailable.

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Phishing aimed at the person who runs the ads lands in the same inbox as the customers.

Manual moderation does not scale with ad spend

One advertiser described spending "hours manually deleting crap" that was "killing my time and energy" at 100-plus comments a day. The time cost rises with spend, not against it: the more an ad works, the more comments arrive under it, spam included.

Some pay for the time instead. One described the workaround as "hire a cheap VA to live in the comments." That turns a comment problem into a payroll line, and still leaves the judgement calls, what to hide and what to leave, to whoever the VA is that day.

Where CommentWatchDog fits

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. Comments from ads are tagged as such in the inbox, with the rule that hid each one shown on the row, and every rule you switch on runs on the ad's comments the moment they land.

Sources

• Meta, Integrity Reports, Second Half 2026 (published August 27, 2026): https://transparency.meta.com/reports/integrity-reports-h2-2026/
• Meta, Integrity Reports, First Half 2026 (published March 19, 2026): https://transparency.meta.com/reports/integrity-reports-h1-2026/
• Advertisers quoted, verbatim, from public threads read September 3, 2026: r/FacebookAds https://www.reddit.com/comments/1ogttv1, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1oj8prn, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1okwgf1, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1kegdec, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1jf29d8, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1cqxzg5
• A WhatChimp ad and the Business Suite inbox, captured September 8, 2026.

These rules are Meta's, stated in its developer documentation for Facebook and Instagram, and every tool that replies privately, the one I built included, works inside them.

What a private reply is

Meta describes it for Facebook as "a single message to a person who published a post on your business' Facebook Page or who commented on a post or comment on the business' Facebook Page or Group. The message will contain a link to the post or comment that the person published."

For Instagram the scope is "a person who commented on your app user's Instagram professional post, reel, story, Live, or ad post." The reply "appears in the person's Inbox, if the person follows the Instagram professional account, or to the Request folder, if they do not."

So it is a message, not a comment moved elsewhere. It obeys messaging rules, and it may land in a folder the person rarely opens.

The first message: once, within seven days

Meta's limitations are worded the same way on both platforms:

• "Only one message can be sent to the person who commented"
• "The message must be sent within 7 days from when the post or comment was created"
• On Instagram Live, "private replies on Instagram Live Story comments can only be sent during the live broadcast"

A comment that sat unanswered for eight days cannot be answered privately at all. A public reply under it is the only route left. And once your one message is sent, there is no second attempt, whatever it said.

The follow-up window: 24 hours from their last message

The one-message rule covers only what you send first. Meta: "Only when a person responds to the private message can you continue the conversation within the 24-hour messaging window."

The clock starts from their reply, not yours, and it resets each time they write back. Answer inside the day and the thread stays open. Let 24 hours pass with nothing from them and it closes like any other Messenger conversation past its window.

This is what a closed thread looks like in CommentWatchDog. I replaced the composer with the reason, so nobody types a message that cannot be sent.

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Facebook groups follow the same rule

Meta's Facebook documentation extends private replies to comments on a Page's Facebook group post, provided the group's own setting is on. It is on by default: "Private replies are On by default. To confirm this setting, the admin of the Facebook Page can go to the Facebook Group, tap Manage in the left panel and scroll down to Settings."

A business with a Page and a linked group works under one rule either way: one message, within seven days, then 24 hours after any reply.

What a refused private reply looks like

When Meta refuses a private reply, because the seven days have passed or the one message has already been sent, the send fails whole. Nothing partial goes out.

The public reply is a separate action. Meta's refusal of the private one does not block a reply under the comment, so the person can still be answered where they wrote.

In CommentWatchDog the choice is made in the composer, a switch between a public reply and a private message on the same comment; the conversation that follows lives in messages. A refused send keeps your words as a draft on the comment and retries on its own, with a cancel if you would rather answer another way.

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Sources

• Meta for Developers, Private replies, Messenger Platform, updated April 16, 2026, read September 5, 2026: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/messenger-platform/discovery/private-replies?locale=en_US
• Meta for Developers, Send a Private Reply to a Commenter, Instagram Platform, updated June 30, 2026, read September 5, 2026: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/instagram-platform/private-replies?locale=en_US
• Meta for Developers, Private replies, Instagram Messaging, updated July 2, 2026, read September 5, 2026: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/instagram-messaging/features/private-replies?locale=en_US

It only hides. No deleting, no replying, and nothing for comments that were already there. The screens below are from my own Facebook profile in professional mode, taken that day.

Where it lives and who gets it

Facebook describes it as "an automation tool for creators to control what comments appear on their Page or profile in Professional Mode."

You reach it from the Professional dashboard: Engagement › Moderation assist, with Comments manager and Activity log beside it. On the web the address is facebook.com/professional_dashboard/moderation_assist, and you must be switched into the Page or the profile you want to protect.

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The page has one group, Manage comments, with the sentence that defines the whole tool: "If any one of these criteria is met, the comment will be auto-hidden."

Add opens the list of criteria. A criterion you have added shows as a row with a pencil. Edit it there, or remove it.

What it judges about the person commenting

Five criteria look at the account, not the words. Facebook's help page lists them as:

• no profile picture
• no friends or followers
• "a Facebook account less than 1 week old"
• "at least 3 comments reported, deleted or hidden by an admin in the past 30 days"
• "may be using a fake identity"

On screen they are named No profile picture, No friends or followers, New profile and Repeat offender. The fake-identity signal has no row of its own.

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A brand-new account with no photo and no friends trips these whether or not its comment is harmless. That is the trade: fast, no list to keep, and a real first-time customer who looks like a bot gets hidden too.

What it judges about the comment itself

Seven criteria look at the comment. Four are content types:

• Link in comment: "Comment has a link"
• Image in comment: "Comment has an image"
• Video in comment: "Comment has a video"
• Links to specific sites: domains you add; adding "site.com" also stops "site.com/abc"

The specific-sites screen still refers to the tool by its older name, Admin Assist.

Profanity is a switch with no list of your own: "Comment contains commonly reported profanity". Facebook's help page says the filter is "currently available for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, Arabic and Russian".

Keywords are yours. The screen reads: "Variations of keywords that use numbers, symbols or different spellings are automatically hidden. Example: tree, TREE, tr33, treee, t.r.e.e, #tree."

The list holds up to 1,000 keywords and accepts a CSV upload. It is the same list as the one in your Settings: "Any edits you make to keywords, either here or in Settings, will be the same in both places."

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The seventh criterion is not on the help page yet. Spam comments reads "Comment is likely to be spam", with the reason "Automatically removing comments that are likely to be spam can help build trust with your followers and viewers and keep your community safe."

It is Facebook's own classifier, and the only criterion that judges what a comment is rather than what it contains.

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What a hidden comment is, and where to undo it

Hiding is the only action. A hidden comment "will still be visible to the person who wrote it and their friends", and "the comment will be hidden for everyone else." Nobody is told. Comments you write as the Page are never affected.

Every action lands in the Activity log: "View moderation actions taken by Moderation Assist and admins." It filters by date, activity type and criterion, and searches by commenter.

Each entry shows the criterion that hid the comment, with an Undo. On a fresh account the log is empty, which is what you see below.

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Two more switches that live in Settings, not here

The keyword list and the profanity filter existed before Moderation Assist. They still sit in the profile or Page settings under Followers and public content, next to Show most relevant comments first, which changes the order of comments rather than hiding any.

On my profile that page showed "Hide comments containing certain words from your profile" as Off, even after I had entered two keywords in Moderation Assist. The list is shared. The switch on the settings page is what turns it on.

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What Moderation Assist leaves undone

Facebook's own note draws the line: Moderation Assist "only hides comments made after you create the criteria, and only hides comments on your Page, profile or ads that you run."

So it covers ads, which matters. And it never touches a backlog, which matters more when a post already has a hundred comments under it.

Beyond that:

• it runs on one Page or profile at a time, with no shared list
• it cannot delete
• it cannot reply
• apart from the spam classifier, it does not read meaning

A polite scam, a negative comment with no bad word in it, or a real question that deserves an answer all pass, unless they happen to match a keyword or an author signal.

What a moderation tool adds on top of it

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. I built it for the part Moderation Assist skips by design, everything already under your posts and ads. Post cleanup loads any post or ad by its link, checks every comment against your rules, and hides or deletes in bulk.

Sources

• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comments with Moderation Assist on Facebook, read September 5, 2026: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1753036688579904?locale=en_US
• Meta Business Help Center, Manage comment moderation for Facebook Pages, read September 5, 2026: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/845417592621623?locale=en_US
• Facebook Help Center, hiding a comment on a Page, read September 5, 2026: https://www.facebook.com/help/297845860255949?locale=en_US
• The Moderation Assist, Activity log and Settings screens of a Facebook profile in professional mode, captured September 8, 2026.

The screens below are Instagram's web settings on my own professional account, taken that day.

The three switches under Hidden Words

Instagram's help page describes the automatic filter as hiding "comments containing common offensive words, phrases, or emojis that are likely to be abusive or mean, such as insults, sexual remarks, or personal attacks against an individual or group." It adds: "This setting is on by default, but you can change it any time."

On the web, Settings › Hidden Words shows three switches under "Offensive words and phrases":

• Hide comments: "Comments that may be offensive will be hidden in a separate section of your posts, reels, lives, videos and channels."
• Advanced comment filtering: "Even more comments that meet our criteria will automatically be hidden."
• Hide message requests: "Message requests that may be offensive will be moved to the hidden requests folder. We'll also filter notifications for these messages."

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All three were on for my account. The help page says the message-request filter "is not currently supported on web browsers"; the web page shows the switch anyway. If you rely on it, turn it on in the app as well.

Your own list: custom words and phrases

Below the switches sits Manage custom words and phrases. The help page describes the list as "words, phrases, numbers or emojis that you don't want to see in comments and message requests", hidden "from comments in posts you share and message requests."

On the web that row opens a page titled Comment filtering. It has a box, "Add keywords, separated by commas", a Submit button, and a second switch: Hide Comments, "Hide comments that contain commonly reported keywords from your posts."

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That second switch was off on my account while the Hide comments switch one screen up was on. Two switches, the same name, two screens, two states. Check both.

What "hidden" means on Instagram

A hidden comment is not deleted and its author is not told. The help page: "hidden comments are still included in your total comment count and when a comment or message is hidden, the person who sent it won't know."

So a post buried in hidden spam still shows the inflated number under it, and the spammer sees their comment as if nothing happened.

Hiding a comment by hand

Outside the filters, you can hide any single comment under your own post. Instagram: "You can only manually hide comments under your own posts. When you manually hide comments, they are only visible to you and the person who made the comment."

Three limits from the same page:

• it works in the iOS or Android app, not on the web
• it is one comment at a time, under Hide
• to reverse it, open the post, then at the bottom: View hidden comments › Unhide

There is no bulk hide, and nothing for a comment on someone else's post.

Where it stops

Every tool here works on words, phrases, numbers and emojis, matched on one account at a time. None of them understand what a comment means.

• A scam written politely passes.
• A negative comment with no bad word in it passes.
• A real question that deserves an answer passes, and nobody is told it is waiting.
• Your custom list only catches what you thought to type, and stops catching anything the moment the spammer changes a spelling.
• Nothing is shared: a word added on one Instagram account does nothing for the next account, or for the Facebook Page beside it.
• Nothing is deleted, and nothing is replied to.

The bots that write most of the comments these lists miss, and the five Instagram tools that do reach them, are in bot comments on Instagram.

Where CommentWatchDog fits

CommentWatchDog is an AI comment moderation tool that automatically hides and deletes spam and damaging comments on Facebook and Instagram ads and posts. I built it for comments that need judgement rather than a word match. Moderation rules read meaning: Negativity, impersonators and custom topics described in plain words, on every Instagram account and Facebook Page you connect, alongside the keyword and link filters Instagram's own tools already offer.

Sources

• Instagram Help Center, Hide comments or message requests you don't want to see on Instagram, read September 5, 2026: https://help.instagram.com/700284123459336/?locale=en_US
• Instagram's Hidden Words and Comment filtering settings on the web, captured September 8, 2026.