Meta restored the Instagram account of the No Kings coalition on Saturday after an automated suspension knocked it offline during the group’s nationwide “No Kings: Vote Early” rallies. Company spokesman Andy Stone apologized, calling the action “clearly taken in error.”
Organizers said the account went dark around 1:30 p.m. Eastern on October 17, as nearly 3,000 events unfolded across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. to drive early voting ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. The page returned to public view after roughly 90 minutes, but administrators stayed locked out of the account for about four more hours.
Stone’s first explanation blamed unusually heavy posting activity. Organizers pushed back, saying they had posted only a handful of times that day and were mostly livestreaming.
On Sunday, Stone offered a revised account. He wrote that the company’s engineering team found the enforcement had been triggered by “reading” behavior: a tool built on Anthropic’s Claude was pulling profiles, posts and hashtags at about four times the normal rate in short bursts, which the company’s security systems read as bot traffic. An automatic re-review about an hour later reversed the suspension, Stone said, though restoring full administrative access took longer. He did not say which Claude tool was involved or who was operating it.
The coalition, which describes itself as nonpartisan and grew out of opposition to President Trump’s actions, wants a fuller explanation. Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg wrote that the excuse did not match the facts. Senator Chris Murphy called the suspension outrageous and said it warranted investigation, while Senator Chris Van Hollen questioned whether Meta was censoring free speech.
Source: TheWrap
