Meta Platforms fully blocked the Instagram account of the anti-Trump group No Kings Coalition for 90 minutes over the weekend as large-scale protests swept across the United States, before issuing an apology on the 19th local time.
The incident occurred as the No Kings Coalition held massive rallies drawing millions of participants across some 3,000 locations, including 50 states and Washington, D.C., on the 17th over the weekend, to encourage early voting ahead of the November 3 U.S. midterm elections.
Strongly condemning Meta, the group criticized whether the action was an "interference in political activity," given that its core platform for real-time communication during the large-scale protests was blocked.
The group added, "Our Instagram page was completely shut down for about 90 minutes on Saturday, and even after the page was restored, the administrators' management privileges remained paralyzed for a while."
As the fallout grew, Andy Stone, Meta's communications vice president, issued an official apology via social media the next day.
He explained, "Anthropic's Claude-based tool accessed the account's profile, posts, and hashtags at a rate four times faster than usual. Due to a sudden surge of massive sequential requests in a short period of time, our security system was triggered, mistaking it for automated macro bot traffic rather than human activity."
However, Meta did not clearly clarify who was operating the Claude AI tool that caused the issue, or why it collected the No Kings Coalition's account data at an abnormally fast speed.
Meta initially stated that the account was blocked due to a surge in posts and comments, but changed its explanation a day later to attribute it to "unauthorized data access by an external AI bot," fueling further controversy.
(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
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