Meta said on Sunday that the system suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings movement during the day of action because it detected “strong” activity by the Claude tool.
The account was locked and administrators were denied access for “several hours” during a nationwide rally Saturday to mobilize early voting in the midterms, the group said.
Meta initially said that an automatic trigger was responsible for disabling the account “by mistake,” but provided a fuller explanation a day later.
“Our engineering team found that the spikes that led to incorrect enforcement were primarily in account ‘reading’ behavior,” spokesperson Andy Stone said in an X post.
“Specifically, our network security system detected the use of the Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, a rate that increased greatly (~4x volume) in a powerful explosion on October 17.”
Stone said the activity resembled bot traffic, causing the system to take accounts offline.
“Automatic re-review of the removal action hours later identified that should not have happened and restore the account. Unfortunately it took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account.
“We would like to express our sincere apologies for the mistake,” he wrote.
The No Kings network, which describes itself as nonpartisan but emerged last year in response to President Donald Trump’s actions, said it held nearly 3,000 rallies across the country to encourage voters to vote early as a hedge against efforts to undermine participation.
“Limiting communication about the election in the middle of the election is unacceptable,” he said.
“Meta must respond to this delay and take immediate steps to ensure that it does not happen again – on any account, but especially those who work to inform voters and encourage participation in our democracy.”