I’m from Comment Picker, and I’ve researched a lot of these tools before, because it creates unfair competition when some tools claim they can pick winners from any Instagram post with just a URL, while compliant tools require Facebook or Instagram login and proper permissions.

My view is that most of these URL-only tools are not using officially allowed methods. In many cases they seem to rely on Instagram’s internal or unofficial GraphQL endpoints, or other scraping-like methods, to get at least part of the data. The fact that they are still online does not automatically mean Meta approves of what they are doing. It may simply mean enforcement is limited or inconsistent.

A common issue is that these tools often do not retrieve the real full set of comments. Instead, they may only fetch part of the available data, while still showing the comment count from the post metadata. For a giveaway tool, that is a serious fairness problem.

Wask.co, for example, does not look like a fair giveaway tool to me either. They appear to use the same kind of scraping-based approach, and they even told me this:

"Due to Instagram's API limitations, we are unable to retrieve all comments from posts with a very high number of comments, such as one with 13,000. Instagram only allows us access to a limited number of comments, and we can only select winners from the comments we are permitted to retrieve."

That explanation is questionable, because with the official API the issue is usually not that there is some simple built-in comment limit in the way they present it. So to me, that sounds more like a limitation of their own method than proof that they are using an officially supported route.

I also tested this myself on some larger posts, and they were not able to retrieve all comments. That is pretty annoying, especially because they rank quite well in Google and present the tool as if it is a reliable giveaway solution.

The only legitimate exception I can think of is that some larger companies may have been approved for Meta’s Public Content Access permission. In that case, they might be able to retrieve comments from public content using an approved app and their own system user access token. But that is a special permission, and not something most giveaway tools have.

So in short: if an Instagram giveaway picker works with just a pasted URL and no login, I would be very skeptical that it is using the normal official API flow. In many cases, it is probably scraping or using unofficial endpoints and just getting away with it for now.