Meta suspends No Kings Instagram account on protest day
Bot filter silenced coalition's voting drive for hours, Murphy calls the platform a private government and demands an investigation
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Protesters gather for a No Kings rally on Saturday in New York. Photograph: Madison Swart/AP
theguardian.com
Meta suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings protest movement on Saturday, in the middle of the coalition's latest nationwide demonstration, and left it dark for several hours before restoring it with an apology. The company blamed an automated bot filter. The account belongs to the coalition that has drawn millions of Americans to pro-democracy protests since last summer, and Saturday's events focused on early voter turnout ahead of the midterm elections.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X that the suspension was 'clearly taken in error' and that 'everything is now working as it should.' In a longer statement, he said 'intense bursts' of reading profiles, posts and hashtags had made Meta's AI tool classify the activity as automated bot traffic, prompting the platform's automated protections to take the account offline. An automated re-review recognized the removal as wrong an hour later, he said; sorting out admin access took longer still. Organizers rejected the explanation, saying members 'posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands.'
The movement began last summer over federal layoffs, immigration enforcement and foreign wars, and has kept its nationwide infrastructure since. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote on X that 'billionaire ownership of the media' had resulted in the suspension. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy called for an investigation, saying Meta functions 'these days as a private government.' He asked how the company was not ready for 'the biggest day of anti-Trump protest of the campaign' while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump.
The coalition regained access and posted on Sunday that 'restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable' — and that Meta still owed it an explanation. Hundreds of planned events continued regardless. At the Lincoln Memorial, a band played for a few hundred people in caps and coats holding signs reading 'VOTE EARLY' and 'HANDS OFF MY VOTE!'; in Atlanta, city councilman Michael Julian Bond asked the crowd whether it would use the one power the constitution gives it, the power to vote.
The re-review that caught the mistake an hour after the suspension was automated too.