Meta says an automated security suspension of the No Kings coalition’s Instagram account was triggered by a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags during the group’s nationwide events. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone explained this in an October 19 post on X.
“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems.”
No Kings, which describes itself as nonpartisan, formed last year in response to President Donald Trump’s actions, AP reported. Meta took its account offline in the middle of the coalition’s nationwide effort to encourage early voting in the November midterm elections.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 18, 2026We 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… https://t.co/lMEdNgtreC
What did Meta say happened?
Meta’s engineering team found that the spike “was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior,” Stone said. “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,” he said.
- The suspension: “This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline,” Stone said.
- The restoration: “An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account,” he said.
- Admin access: “It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account.”
Meta has not specified which Claude tool was involved, who was operating it, or what activity it was carrying out in connection with the account, Bloomberg reported. Anthropic develops Claude.
How has Meta’s explanation changed?
On the day of the events, Stone gave a different reason.
“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.”
Meta’s second explanation attributes the suspension to the account’s reading activity instead of its posting, sharing or commenting.
What has No Kings said?
The account was suspended for about 90 minutes while nearly 3,000 events were taking place across the US, No Kings leaders said, according to Newsweek. Even after the account was restored publicly, its administrators could not access the backend for about four hours, the organisers said. “We cannot post or communicate with our network, meaning Meta is still actively depriving us of our platform at a critical time,” a No Kings representative told Newsweek on the day of the events.
“Meta must answer for this suspension and take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again,” the coalition said, according to AP.
Why does this matter for Indian users?
Several Indian users and businesses have struggled to find out why Meta restricted or deactivated their accounts:
- Blink Digital: Meta disabled four Business Manager accounts belonging to advertising agency Blink Digital. Neither of the Bombay High Court’s first two orders recorded the reason for the action, as we reported. At a hearing on October 13, Meta cited ads for scams and sexual services.
- Aakanksha Gupta: In August, the Delhi High Court directed Meta to place on record the material behind deactivating the SEBI-registered analyst’s Instagram account.
- Fake copyright complaints: Creator Nitin Joshi has filed a public interest litigation alleging that bot-operated accounts file fake copyright complaints to trigger automated enforcement, after which the operators ask creators to pay to get their accounts back.
- Protest coverage: Some of Meta’s notices to Indian users whose protest content it restricted in October cited action “through an automated system” under the IT Rules. The notices did not name the agency, order, provision of law or URL involved, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) said. An “automated system” also restricted cartoonist Satish Acharya’s Instagram posts, as we reported.
Meta’s Oversight Board said in June that Meta does not publicly set out all the restrictions it can apply to Instagram accounts before disabling them, and warned against appeal processes that only rerun automated decisions.
Also read:
- Blink Digital sues Meta over disabled accounts
- Delhi HC orders Meta to disclose why it deactivated a stock market analyst’s Instagram account
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