Paul Walsh · Substack · October 19, 2026
TL;DR
On 17 October, Meta suspended the official Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition during a nationwide campaign that was aimed at encouraging Americans to vote early in the 3 November midterm elections. Almost 3,000 events were taking place across the United States. Organisers lost access to their account at approximately 1:30pm Eastern Time, when they needed it to communicate with participants.
Meta initially blamed excessive posting, sharing, and commenting. The following day, its Vice President of Communications, Andy Stone, changed the explanation. Meta now claims that software using Claude AI was reading Instagram profiles, posts and hashtags at 4 times the normal rate.
The account became publicly visible again after approximately 90 minutes, but organisers couldn’t publish anything until Meta restored access hours later at 5:33pm.
Meta censored a political organisation during a national voting campaign, blamed its own automation, then claimed its automated systems had detected another automated tool. Meta admitted the suspension was wrong, but none of its explanations account for what happened from a technical standpoint.
Meta’s response is exactly what independent technical experts like me have warned about. I point this out because we can’t allow tech companies to avoid responsibility and accountability for their actions by blaming AI.
Tech companies are blaming everything but themselves. Meta is a company whose technology can infer what flavour of ice cream a 7-year-old likes from something her uncle’s dog posted on Instagram in 2020, yet apparently can’t explain why its own systems censored a political organisation at one of the most critical moments in its history.
This is my independent technical analysis of Meta’s actions, not an endorsement of the No Kings Coalition or its politics. It doesn’t matter if you support or oppose this organisation, you should be deeply concerned that Zuckerberg can censor anyone, including people or organisations you support, without providing evidence or accountability. The same filters can be used against anyone whose views conflict with Meta’s commercial or Zuckerberg’s political interests, now or in the future.
Meta keeps changing its explanation
On 17 October, Andy Stone wrote:
“When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems.”
[
Andy Stone@andymstone
When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. 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…
10:07 PM · Oct 17, 2026 · 362K Views
894 Replies · 37 Reposts · 217 Likes](https://x.com/andymstone/status/2111579972116824545?s=20)
Stone blamed unusually frequent activity by the account itself, but the organisers disputed this, saying they’d published only a handful of posts and were livestreaming the events. Given how easily Meta’s own records could prove or disprove that claim, I suspect the company needed a more convincing explanation.
A day later, Stone provided a different explanation, saying the activity was primarily the account’s “reading” behaviour.
[
Andy Stone@andymstone
We have continued to dig into the root cause here and would like to offer an update. Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s “reading” behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected…
Andy Stone @andymstone
When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. 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
8:41 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 353K Views
361 Replies · 29 Reposts · 177 Likes](https://x.com/andymstone/status/2111920686306627816?s=20)
Posting and reading are completely different activities, something a competent developer or data scientist could identify within minutes by examining the activity logs. Publishing posts, sharing content and commenting involve sending information to Instagram. Reading profiles, posts and hashtags involves requesting information from Instagram.
Meta initially blamed the organisation’s publishing activity. Its engineers then identified reading activity instead.
Stone should explain what evidence supported his first and second statement.
Meta blamed Claude without identifying who was responsible
In his revised statement, Stone said Meta’s security systems had detected “the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags”.
Meta explicitly named Anthropic’s AI software but didn’t identify the tool, who operated it or whether the No Kings organisers had authorised it.
Is Meta suggesting that using Claude to access Instagram is prohibited? If so, which policy was violated? If not, why did Meta suspend the organisation’s account instead of restricting the automated requests?
Meta claims activity increased fourfold
Stone said the rate of requests “sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts”.
Four times what?
If an account normally receives 100 requests during a particular period, four times that means 400. If it normally receives 100,000, the increase means 400,000.
My LinkedIn posts typically reach between 2,000 and 250,000 readers, while my posts on X range from 1,500 to 1.2 million. Sudden increases in activity are normal on social media.
Stone’s reference to “intense bursts” sounds alarming but provides no meaningful technical information without the actual request counts, timeframe and frequency. Even a small number of automated requests can arrive in intense bursts. What Meta hasn’t established is why those requests justified suspending the organisation’s account.
Reader counts and automated requests are different measurements, so the size of an audience alone cannot establish whether Meta’s security threshold was reasonable.
Without the actual numbers, the measurement period and Meta’s security thresholds, the figure doesn’t tell us anything.
The No Kings Coalition was coordinating almost 3,000 events. Increased activity involving its Instagram account was entirely predictable.
Meta is using a percentage without providing the numbers needed to determine if the activity justified suspending a political organisation.
Meta described automated reading as a security threat
Stone said the requests “resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems”.
I founded a venture-backed cybersecurity company in Silicon Valley in 2010 and built the first security chatbots in the world - they automated actions on platforms like Slack, HipChat, Messenger, and Telegram between 2015 and 2019. I can say with confidence that automated activity isn’t inherently a security violation. No competent cybersecurity professional or chatbot developer would automatically classify automation as malicious. That makes no technical sense. Search engines, monitoring tools, research applications and AI assistants make billions of automated requests every hour of every day. Platforms have systems that are designed to identify excessive traffic, restrict access credentials and block requests that violate their policies.
Does Meta apply the same restrictions to people using its own AI assistant, Muse, to automate interactions with Facebook and Instagram? If not, why?
Meta admitted the suspension was wrong but continued to restrict their account
Stone claimed an automated review recognised the suspension was wrong and restored the account approximately an hour later. This is disingenuous. Meta restored public visibility, but the organisers remained locked out for hours. By saying the account had been restored, Stone concealed the fact that Meta was still preventing the organisation from publishing. Even when explaining a mistake of this magnitude, Meta chose language that obscured what actually happened.
The No Kings organisers reported that their Instagram page became publicly visible again after approximately 90 minutes, but they still couldn’t use it. People managing the account remained locked out until 5:33pm Eastern Time.
Meta’s own automated review had already decided that the suspension was wrong, yet the organisers remained unable to publish posts or communicate with supporters during their nationwide campaign.
Stone later said that restoring administrative access took additional time. Why? The only credible explanation in my view, is that restoring meaningful access required a Meta employee with the necessary authority. That suggests someone had to approve the reversal of a suspension Meta had already admitted was wrong. Meta should identify who controlled that decision, who authorised the restoration and why the organisers were kept locked out.
Restoring an Instagram page that its organisers still can’t use doesn’t restore their ability to communicate. Meta’s decision to censor them continued affecting the organisation after its own systems had recognised the suspension was wrong.
Meta’s apology doesn’t explain who made the decisions
Stone described the original enforcement action as “clearly taken in error”. There’s nothing clear about it. It’s clear to me that the opposite to what he says is more likely to be true.
An automated system doesn’t independently decide which behaviour violates Instagram’s policies, especially when it comes to such prominent accounts.
The No Kings Coalition is one of America’s most prominent anti-Trump movements, organising nationwide demonstrations that involve millions of people across thousands of locations. Suspending its Instagram account during a major mobilisation campaign was a politically significant decision with predictable consequences.
Given the organisation’s prominence, the timing and the public backlash, multiple Meta teams and senior managers had to be involved in decisions about the suspension and restoration. Zuckerberg himself would have been involved, given his hands-on approach to major content moderation decisions.
This wasn’t simply a software error. People made the decisions, and Meta’s automated systems executed them. Restoring public visibility while keeping organisers locked out required separate enforcement decisions that Meta has yet to explain.
Meta’s records can identify which individuals reviewed the incident, who authorised changes, whether senior executives were briefed and why restoring full access took hours.
This isn’t the first recent case involving Meta censoring political communications during an election
I wrote article 18 hours ago to explain how in Brazil, Meta blocked the sitting president (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) from running normal paid Instagram promotions while its algorithms and WhatsApp recommended his opponent Flávio Bolsonaro. Its AI refused basic Lula campaign material but produced the equivalent for Bolsonaro. Some of Meta’s staff flagged the unequal treatment in real time and escalated it; the company later offered shifting technical excuses that don’t match the dates or the fact that Bolsonaro’s campaign kept using the same tools Lula couldn’t access.
During the election, Meta ran over 1,600 political ads that researchers found were illegal, almost all paid for in US dollars, and only reclassified or removed them after they’d already been shown up to 171.1 million times. Complaints about account suspensions increased 585% during the election year.The Brazil case doesn’t establish that the No Kings suspension was coordinated or deliberate. It establishes another example of politically consequential account restrictions that Meta attributed to technical failures.
Meta controls when political organisations and parties can publish, advertise, appear in recommendations and communicate with their audiences. For high-profile accounts, Meta’s executives are responsible for making those decisions, not automated systems.
Meta must explain what its systems actually did
Meta has logs that record absolutely everything. They know precisely what triggered the suspension, who or what caused it, which restrictions were imposed and which employees were responsible for each and every action. It also knows why organisers remained locked out after the suspension was reversed.
Meta might not document every decision made by its employees, but its system logs contain the technical evidence needed to explain what happened, unless those records have been deleted.
The public deserves to know why Mark Zuckerberg’s company is censoring political organisations and individuals in ways that just happen to favour the White House’s political agenda, cutting them off from their audiences precisely when they need to communicate most.
Congress should summon the engineers and data scientists responsible for these systems, put them under oath and demand specific technical answers backed by system logs. They shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind corporate statements or blame automation for decisions made by people.
Follow the evidence, not the headlines.
21 questions Meta should answer
Meta’s engineers and data scientists should answer these questions and provide the technical records, internal communications, and enforcement logs to support their answers. Calling policy staff is pointless. They’ll either deflect or lack the technical knowledge to explain what actually happened.
- Why did Andy Stone initially blame excessive posting, sharing and commenting when Meta later blamed reading activity? What evidence supported his first statement, who approved it and when did Meta establish that the explanation was incorrect?
- What constitutes fair and acceptable use of Instagram by automated tools? Which activities are permitted, what limits apply, and what specific policy did the alleged Claude tool violate?
- Do the same restrictions apply to Meta’s own AI assistant, Muse? Can people use Muse to automate reading, posting and interacting with Instagram and Facebook? If so, why was No Kings suspended for alleged automation, and does Meta apply the same enforcement thresholds to its own AI tools and competing services?
- What information was the tool accessing? Was it reading publicly available content, using an authenticated account or attempting to access private information?
- What does the fourfold increase actually represent? How many requests occurred, over what period, and what was the normal level of activity? Is a fourfold increase an established threshold for suspending all Instagram accounts, or was a different threshold applied to No Kings? Provide the exact measurements, enforcement thresholds and comparable records showing how Meta treats other accounts experiencing the same increase.
- Which security restriction triggered the suspension? Was the decision based on request frequency, suspicious authentication, account behaviour or another classification? Identify the exact policy and technical conditions that triggered enforcement.
- Why did Meta suspend No Kings instead of restricting the software making the requests? What evidence established that the organisation was responsible? Why weren’t regular security controls, including IP blocking, rate limiting or access-token restrictions, sufficient?
- Did Meta classify No Kings as a politically sensitive account? Were its security thresholds, monitoring arrangements or enforcement procedures different from those applied to other big or contraversial accounts? Provide its account classifications and any associated enforcement policies.
- Did any Meta employee manually review, classify, restrict or change settings associated with No Kings before or during the suspension? Identify every action, its timestamp, the employee or team responsible and the reason recorded.
- What happened during the automated review that reversed the suspension? Which original finding was overturned, what evidence caused the reversal and which restrictions did the review actually remove?
- Why were organisers still locked out after Meta recognised that the suspension was wrong? Which separate restriction remained active, why wasn’t it automatically removed and who or what eventually removed it?
- Did any Meta employee manually restore administrative access? Provide the audit records showing when access was restored, which systems were involved and whether an employee intervened.
- What happened to scheduled posts, livestreams, notifications and other communications during the suspension? How many people would otherwise have received those communications, and did Meta measure the disruption?
- How many political organisations have experienced comparable suspensions? How often has Meta blamed automated activity for restrictions that subsequent reviews found were incorrect? Provide figures for suspensions during elections, protests and other major political events.
- Did Meta communicate with any US government official, political campaign, intelligence agency or external organisation about No Kings before or during the suspension? Identify the participants, dates, subjects discussed and whether any communication concerned account restrictions or content distribution.
- Will Meta permit independent investigators to examine the account classifications, security logs, enforcement records and restoration history? If not, why?
- Were any manual configuration changes, overrides, blocklists or changes to enforcement thresholds applied to No Kings or associated hashtags within 72 hours of the suspension? Identify every change, who authorised it, when it took effect and if it was reversed later on.
- Did Meta open an internal security or engineering incident involving No Kings before, during or after the suspension? Provide the incident severity, timestamps, assigned teams, tickets and relevant internal communications between security, engineering, public policy and trust and safety employees.
- Does Meta use automated account restrictions or reduced content distribution for accounts involved in political mobilisation? Identify the policies, account classifications, automated enforcement conditions and any testing programmes that can restrict political accounts during periods of unusually high engagement.
- Can Meta establish that No Kings would have been suspended under exactly the same conditions if it had been a commercial brand, celebrity or non-political organisation? Provide comparable enforcement records and explain if the coalition’s political classification influenced the decision.
- Did Meta’s systems suspend No Kings because of a standard security policy, a special account-level configuration or a manual decision implemented through automation? Provide the configuration history, original enforcement trigger, account-specific settings and audit records needed to establish which explanation is correct.
Meta should not be allowed to answer these questions with another statement about automated systems. Its executives should provide the records that establish what those systems were instructed to do, who authorised those instructions and why the No Kings account was suspended.
If Zuckerberg wants people to believe this was an innocent automated mistake, Meta should release the records that establish it. An apology isn’t evidence.
I used three AI models to help edit and refine this article. All the research, analysis, connections I’ve made between people, companies and events, and the opinions and conclusions are mine. I’m dyslexic, like 35% of entrepreneurs, so I used AI to improve my writing, not to do my thinking.
Originally published at Paul Walsh's Substack.