Meta suspended the No Kings Coalition‘s main Instagram account for about 90 minutes on Saturday, as organizers staged nearly 3,000 “No Kings: Vote Early” events nationwide, and the company has since offered two different explanations.
Administrators lost access at about 1:30 p.m. Eastern, a coalition spokesperson said. Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin said, “They suspended it. We didn’t have access to it.”
The account reappeared publicly, but administrators stayed locked out of its back end for roughly four hours, and the coalition said it regained full access at 5:33 p.m. Eastern. The coalition said Meta still owes it an explanation and called restrictions on voting communications unacceptable.
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Meta spokesman Andy Stone said Saturday that very high rates of posting, sharing or commenting can set off automated systems. He called the suspension a clear error and apologized.
On Sunday, Meta changed its account. Stone said engineers found tools connected to Anthropic’s Claude had been pulling posts, profiles and hashtags at four times the usual pace, and that the requests resembled bot traffic. Meta said a follow-up automated check restored the account roughly an hour afterward.
Meta has not identified the tool or its operator, and it has not said whether the tool had any link to the coalition, according to reports.
Levin compared the episode to a Brazilian case. On Thursday, Brazil’s top electoral court ordered Meta to treat Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro equally ahead of an October 25 runoff, after Lula’s campaign alleged algorithmic bias. Meta has rejected accusations that it favors Bolsonaro.
The suspension comes as Meta has moved closer to President Donald Trump. In January 2025, Meta ended third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram after Mark Zuckerberg called the fact-checkers “politically biased,” and the company later that month agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over his 2021 account suspensions.
Meta has also contributed $5 million to Trump’s White House ballroom project, and a report this month says Zuckerberg helped shape an AI pact Trump signed with industry leaders. Meta’s super PACs have backed Democrats and Republicans in primaries. Nothing in the reporting so far ties the Instagram suspension to those relationships.
