Meta blames a Claude AI tool for knocking No Kings off Instagram during protests
The company says bursts of automated 'reading' on the anti-Trump coalition's account looked like bot traffic and tripped its security systems. It has apologised, but the organisers are not satisfied.
Key points
- The No Kings account was unavailable for about 90 minutes on Saturday as protests took place across the US.
- Meta says a Claude tool was reading profiles and posts at about four times the normal rate.
- Meta communications chief Andy Stone said the suspension was clearly an error.
Meta has blamed an artificial intelligence tool built on Anthropic’s Claude for the suspension of the No Kings coalition’s Instagram account on Saturday, at the height of nationwide demonstrations against President Donald Trump.
The anti-Trump group’s account went dark for about 90 minutes as its supporters gathered at events across the United States ahead of the 3 November midterm elections. The coalition says it held nearly 3,000 events in all 50 states and Washington, with millions taking part.
What Meta says happened
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice-president of communications, said on Sunday that the company’s Instagram engineers had traced the suspension to the account’s “reading” activity. A Claude tool, he said, had been accessing profiles, posts and hashtags at about four times the normal rate, in intense bursts.
The pattern “resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems”, Stone said, and the company’s automated security system shut the account down.
He called the suspension “clearly” an error. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error,” he said.
Stone did not say which Claude product was involved, who was operating it, or what it was being used to do on the account.
It was the second explanation Meta has offered. Stone had first said the account was caught by unusually high rates of posting, sharing or commenting, before giving the more detailed version on Sunday.
A slow return
Meta’s own automated review found the removal was wrong about an hour after it happened and made the account visible again. Organisers said, however, that they stayed locked out of it for longer, and that full administrative access came back only at 5:33 pm New York time on Saturday.
The coalition criticised Meta for restricting its account in the middle of the demonstrations. It did not respond to questions about the Claude explanation. The group is planning a national organising call on Wednesday focused on turnout before election day.
Why it matters
The episode is an early public example of a problem many platforms are now wrestling with: AI agents that browse and read on a user’s behalf can look, to a security system, much like the scraping bots those systems were built to stop.
Organisations increasingly hand social media monitoring and research to such tools. If a platform’s defences cannot tell the difference, accounts can be cut off at the moments they matter most, as the coalition found on one of its busiest days of the year.