Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has offered a detailed explanation and a fresh apology after the Instagram account of the No Kings movement was suspended for several hours during nationwide rallies for suspicious behavior driven by AI usage. Leftists including Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who were silent for more than a decade of Meta censoring conservatives suddenly are expressing alarm about censorship.
Business Insider reports that the No Kings account was locked and administrators were denied access during Saturday’s “day of action,” when the nonpartisan network said it held nearly 3,000 rallies across the country. The demonstrations were meant to push voters to cast ballots early, a hedge against what organizers describe as efforts to undermine turnout.
Meta initially said the shutdown happened “in error” because of an automatic trigger, but didn’t offer a fuller account until a day later. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone laid out what happened in a post on X, saying the company’s engineering team traced the problem to unusual activity on the account. “Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior,” Stone wrote.
He said the trouble began with a surge in automated-looking activity. “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. That activity resembled bot traffic, so the system took the account offline.
The account came back fairly quickly on its own. “An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account,” Stone wrote. But the group’s administrators stayed locked out longer. “It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he said.
Stone closed with an apology. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error,” he wrote. Meta’s effusive apology and technical explanation stands in stark contrast to its past history of censoring conservatives with little or not explanation.
No Kings pushed back on the timing, given that the outage hit during an active voter-mobilization push. “Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable,” the group said in a statement, calling on Meta to make changes. “Meta must answer for this suspension and take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again, to any account, but especially those working to inform voters and encourage participation in our democracy,” the statement said.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) a longtime advocate for stricter regulation and anti-monopoly laws targeting Big Tech, weighed in Sunday evening and called for an investigation into the shutdown. He described the episode as a “total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics.” Sen. Murphy did not express this feeling when his political opponents were censored in the past.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is leading the charge against Meta, claiming that Americans must “defend democracy” against “oligarchs.”
But Sanders has not always been against Big Tech censorship. In 2021, Sanders justified throwing Donald Trump out of office based on Twitter and Meta censoring the President’s accounts:
Sanders, the “democratic socialist” from Vermont who was President-elect Donald Trump’s main rival in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, tweeted: “Let’s be clear. If Trump is too dangerous to send out a tweet or a Facebook post, he’s too dangerous to be commander-in-chief. Donald Trump must be removed from office immediately and held accountable for his horrific acts of sedition, violence and chaos.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
