Meta says a Claude-connected tool’s scraping triggered the wrongful suspension of the No Kings Instagram account on a protest day

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Key facts

• Suspension: Sat Oct 17, about 1:30 p.m. Eastern; the account was publicly visible again about 90 minutes later, but organisers say full admin access returned only at 5:33 p.m. Eastern
• Meta’s first explanation (Andy Stone, VP communications, Oct 17): high rates of posting, sharing or commenting can trigger automated systems; the action was ‘clearly’ an error
• Meta’s second explanation (Stone, social media post, Sun Oct 18): engineers found ‘reading’ activity by a tool connected to Anthropic’s Claude accessing profiles, posts and hashtags at about four times the normal rate in intense bursts, which ‘resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems’; an automated review restored the account about an hour later. ‘We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.’
• Not said by Meta: which Claude-based tool, who operated it, or whether it was linked to the coalition. No Anthropic statement in any report we read
• Organisers: Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin: ‘They suspended it. We didn’t have access to it’; he compared it to Brazil, where on Oct 15 the electoral court ordered Meta to treat Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro equally before the Oct 25 runoff. The coalition says Meta still owes it an explanation; Common Cause raised it as a free-speech concern
• Scale claimed by the coalition: millions of participants at nearly 3,000 events in all 50 states and D.C. to push early voting; administrators say they posted only a handful of times that day and mainly livestreamed rallies (Newsweek, via Startup Fortune)