Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.
During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hours-long suspension: there was a high volume of activity on the page.
“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 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 on X Sunday.
“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline.”
“An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he continued. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”
The No Kings Coalition claimed that Meta’s explanation still didn’t make sense.
“In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands. Meta’s ‘high frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up,” the group wrote on Bluesky Sunday.
“Beyond shutting down our Instagram, we’ve received reports that #NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms,” the group wrote in a separate post.
onnecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded to Stone’s statement, calling on X for an investigation into the No Kings account’s sudden suspension. “Let’s assume this is true. It’s still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics,” he wrote.
“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he added.
By cozying up to the Trump administration, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts. Now, it appears that the company may be doubling down on its allegiances by outright silencing the president’s critics.