Meta apologizes for suspending ‘No Kings’ Instagram account, blaming bot traffic increase

Facebook’s parent company Meta apologized Sunday for suspending the “No Kings” Instagram account, saying the suspension was caused by a high increase in traffic by bots.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote in a statement that the company’s engineering team found the “spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior” attributed to the rapid use of the Anthropic model Claude.

“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems,” he said. “This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline. … It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG [Instagram] account.”

Stone explained Saturday that when accounts post, share or comment at high frequencies, they can trigger the platform’s automated systems . He said the activity around Saturday’s demonstration caused the systems to erroneously take action.

“Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error,” Stone said. “Everything is now working as it should, and we sincerely apologize.”

Meta suspended the account for more than an hour, Reuters reported .

The No Kings Coalition, with control of its Instagram account restored, used the platform to blast Meta and say the company “still owes us an explanation.” Organizers said the weekend protests were intended as a “ day of action ” to get Americans to vote early ahead of the midterm elections.

“Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable,” the group wrote . “Meta must answer for this suspension and take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again – to any account, but especially those working to inform voters and encourage participation in our democracy.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) questioned the suspension, saying if the traffic increase was real, it was “still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics.”

“How were they not ready for the biggest day of anti-[President] Trump protest of the campaign?” he wrote in a post on the social platform X. “If it wasn’t malevolence, it was likely a natural consequence of a company that is desperate to get as close to Trump as possible (and thus has a disincentive to do the basic, proactive work to be ready to support users on No Kings Day).”

Murphy said the suspension warrants an investigation “to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump.”

The No Kings Coalition has led a series of protests aimed at denouncing the president and his administration’s policies since last year. Around 5 million people took to the streets during No Kings marches in June 2025, while 7 million protested the Trump administration last October, organizers said .