Claude triggered suspension of anti-Trump group's Instagram account: Meta
What's the story
Meta Platforms has apologized and explained the suspension of the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition, an anti-Trump group. The disruption occurred during a nationwide series of demonstrations and while the group was pushing for early voting ahead of midterm elections on November 3. An automated security system mistakenly suspended their account due to high-volume activity from Anthropic's Claude AI tool.
AI impact
Claude accessed profiles, posts, and hashtags at unusually high rate
Instagram's engineering team found that Claude AI was accessing profiles, posts, and hashtags at an unusually high rate.
This activity triggered their automated systems, leading to the suspension of the No Kings Coalition's Instagram account.
"These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems," Andy Stone, Meta's VP of communications said in a social media post.
Restoration delay
Account was unavailable for about 90 minutes
An automated review conducted about an hour later found that the account shouldn't have been removed and restored it.
However, full access was only restored by 5:33pm New York time on Saturday.
The No Kings Coalition said its Instagram page was unavailable for about 90 minutes, with organizers remaining locked out even after it became publicly visible again.