She got it back after the NY Times reached out to FB/Meta:
On Dec. 2, a month after Ms. Baumann first appealed to Instagram to restore her account, The New York Times contacted Meta to ask why it had been shut down. An Instagram spokesman said that the account had been “incorrectly removed for impersonation” and would be restored. “We’re sorry this error occurred,” he wrote.
My own primary account was recently "incorrectly removed for impersonation" by "one of our systems," just weeks after I had to send a picture of myself with a handwritten magic code to an anonymous facebook.com email address to regain access to the account after they changed my password from beneath me. I've also got a desirable account name, but I think the main reason was talking too much smack about zuck. I mean, surely facebook and half its staff are going to be sued into oblivion for knowingly and willfully designing a system to crush girls' dreams -- they must have figured out they were doing that the instant they spun up an analytics team.
It's insane that when things like this happen, if you don't burn your 15 minutes of fame to make the front page of a million+ user website you're just SOL.
Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work.
In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate.
In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers.
She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet.
In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. “You are now a millionaire,” one person wrote on her account. Another warned: “fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it.”
This is pretty clickbaity. She was banned for, "pretending to be someone else" and restored a month later for, "incorrectly removed for impersonation". This person had, "fewer than 1,000 followers" before the ban.
I get hating Facebook is cool and NYT needs to get clicks somehow, but social media is a space where career content producers lose significant income regularly from automated TOS violation detectors. You could write this article daily about Youtube.
EDIT: 'Small Insta called "Metaverse" faced accidental ban, restored after month' There that's a title meant to inform and not be ragebait.
Ban was only reversed after NYT coverage. Can't run that story every day.
FB knows how to control your mind though. They reverse the ban _in response to_ the news article, neutralizing the content of the news article in your mind. FB never lost money underestimating the public!
14 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] threadAt least she got it back.
It does beg the question; was she originally banned by an algorithm or by a human being?
There's so little transparency at these companies and they hold power that they should not have.
On Dec. 2, a month after Ms. Baumann first appealed to Instagram to restore her account, The New York Times contacted Meta to ask why it had been shut down. An Instagram spokesman said that the account had been “incorrectly removed for impersonation” and would be restored. “We’re sorry this error occurred,” he wrote.
Two days later, the account was back online.
Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work.
In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate. In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers. She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet.
In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. “You are now a millionaire,” one person wrote on her account. Another warned: “fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it.”
On Nov. 2, exactly that happened.
I get hating Facebook is cool and NYT needs to get clicks somehow, but social media is a space where career content producers lose significant income regularly from automated TOS violation detectors. You could write this article daily about Youtube.
EDIT: 'Small Insta called "Metaverse" faced accidental ban, restored after month' There that's a title meant to inform and not be ragebait.
FB knows how to control your mind though. They reverse the ban _in response to_ the news article, neutralizing the content of the news article in your mind. FB never lost money underestimating the public!
You have no evidence that this was accidental