Meta Defends Blocking No Kings’ Instagram in the Middle of Event
Meta blamed the account suspension on a technical error.
Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.
During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hours-long suspension: there was a high volume of activity on the page.
“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote on X Sunday.
“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ...