Meta says suspension of No Kings coalition's Instagram account was an error

Meta says an automated system wrongly disabled the main Instagram account of the No Kings coalition on Saturday (US time), while the group was holding nationwide events against President Donald Trump’s administration.

“When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies, it can trigger automated systems,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote in a post on X on Saturday evening. “That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead-up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should, and we sincerely apologize.”

In a follow-up post on Sunday, Stone said Meta’s engineering team had found that the spike in activity was “primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior”.

According to The Independent, organisers said administrative access to the account was cut at about 1.30pm Eastern Time on Saturday, and that they remained locked out for roughly four hours after the page became visible again. The coalition was coordinating nearly 3,000 “Vote Early” events across all 50 states and Washington, DC, ahead of the November midterm elections, the newspaper reported.

“We couldn’t post to it. Nobody could go to the page,” organiser Ezra Levin of Indivisible told the MeidasTouch network, as quoted by The Independent.

In a post reported by Business Insider, the coalition said: “Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable,” and that “Meta must answer for this suspension.”

The Verge reported that the profile page was back up later on Saturday.