Meta, the owner of Instagram, apologized for disabling an Instagram account run by No Kings Coalition, the organizers of the No Kings Day political rallies held across the country on Oct. 17.
Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, posted about the events on X the day of the rallies, with a follow-up message the next day. Stone said the blackout lasted about an hour in the middle of the protests and was an accidental shutdown caused by the engineering team’s automated systems detecting a traffic spike.
Specifically, the team detected a Claude AI tool reading profiles, posts and hashtags at an unusually high rate.
“It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” Stone wrote.
A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
The timing and duration of the outage were criticized by the No Kings Coalition, which wrote about it on the restored account.
“Even after visibility was restored, we still had no access to the account for hours,” the post read. “Meta still owes us an explanation. Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable.”
As of Monday afternoon, the Instagram post had more than 70,000 likes. A representative for the No Kings Coalition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Saturday’s rallies took place a year after the group’s 2025 events, when protests were organized in 2,500 cities. The rallies, which began in June of last year, protest the policies of President Donald Trump. This year, the impending Nov. 3 midterm elections have added urgency to the events, with demonstrations focused on educating voters about early voting and expanding voter registration.
“The public is clearly primed to suspect that platforms’ high-profile content moderation decisions are politically motivated,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, in an email.
Ruane noted that the automated moderation tools Meta blamed for the removal of the account have “important limitations including poor performance when making context-dependent decisions, especially for real-time and fast-moving events,” she said. “Users deserve to know when their content and accounts are being taken down and why, regardless of moderation method.”
Activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, who said she was at a No Kings Coalition event in Dallas over the weekend, accused Meta of disrupting other accounts in the past during other political activism events.
“You mean to tell me in the middle of that day, it just so happens that the No Kings account is down for almost two hours?” she said in an Instagram video response. “I’ve got questions, and somebody needs to have some answers.”
Meta is also dealing with blowback about a separate issue. The company backtracked on plans to change its contractual language for business customers in a way that would have allowed it to scrape information for AI training.
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