AIFoPa-2026-0045
Date of Record: 19 Oct 2026
3 min read
The Account Had Been Reading Too Fast
Meta took the No Kings Coalition’s Instagram account offline on 17 October 2026, during a nationwide day of action, and later traced the trigger to a Claude tool.
The No Kings Coalition is an American protest movement opposed to President Trump’s policies. Saturday 17 October 2026 was the third round of its rallies. The coalition held nearly 3,000 events across all 50 states and Washington, DC. The purpose was to encourage early voting before the midterm elections on 3 November. In the middle of the day of action its main Instagram account went offline. Instagram is owned by Meta.
Andy Stone is Meta’s spokesperson. That evening he posted an explanation on X, the social network. “When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems,” he wrote. “That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action.” He called the action “clearly taken in error” and apologised.
On Sunday 18 October Mr Stone posted again. Meta’s engineering team had found that the spike “was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior.” Its network security systems had “detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags.” Claude is an AI model made by Anthropic. On Saturday the account had posted too much. On Sunday it had read too fast.
The rate had “sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17.” The requests “resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems,” Mr Stone wrote. The automated protections exist to catch bot traffic. The coalition had been using the account to livestream rallies. The rate was approximately four times its earlier volume. Meta supplied the tilde.
An automated re-review an hour later “recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account.” The page was visible again after about 90 minutes, by the coalition’s count. Its administrators were still locked out. Full access returned at 5.33 pm Eastern time. Removal to restoration took the automated protections an hour. Restoring the administrators took Meta the rest of the afternoon.
Meta did not say which Claude tool was involved, who operated it, or what it was doing. In Mr Stone’s description, the reading was the account’s own behaviour. The reader was a Claude tool. Nobody has said whose.
On Monday 19 October the coalition replied on Bluesky, another social network. “Meta’s explanation still doesn’t add up,” it said. “Weeks before an election, an apology isn’t enough. The public needs answers, accountability, and concrete safeguards.” Mr Stone had apologised twice. The Bureau has filed both apologies and the tilde.