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 Saturday.
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. “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. “It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account.”
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A representative for Meta didn’t 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.
The organization set up a webpage detailing the incident and published an open letter to Meta with questions about how the incident happened, whether Meta was in communication with the Trump administration or any other organization about the No Kings events, and whether Meta will guarantee human review of midterm-related content between now and the election.
“Critical voter information or civic participation should not be blocked, throttled, or otherwise interfered with if Meta aspires to be a trusted actor in our democracy,” the letter states.
No Kings Coalition set a deadline of 5 p.m. PT Wednesday for Meta to respond.
Reaction to the account outage
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.
Read more: How to Spot Political Deepfakes and Scams This Midterm Election Season
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.”
Meta’s Oversight Board issued a statement on Tuesday calling the No Kings Coalition incident part of a series of “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts.” The Oversight Board is funded by Meta but operates independently to review moderation decisions and provide advisory opinions.
“The enforcement error regarding the No Kings account should have been caught by Meta’s mistake-prevention systems,” the board said. “It remains unclear why Meta’s election integrity efforts did not lead to a much quicker resolution or why No Kings accounts were not included in Meta’s cross-check program – which allows the company to designate important civic entities to ensure human review before a decision is made that could severely jeopardize participation in a significant political event.”
It also mentioned Meta’s handling of candidate accounts ahead of a Brazilian presidential election as more evidence of problems that could lead to election interference.
Followers of the No Kings account expressed outrage over Meta’s actions and skepticism about whether it was a mistake. 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.
