This time of the year is typically the busy booking season for Sam Enticknap, a makeup artist based in Margaret River, Western Australia. But the phone has stopped ringing since her Instagram account, which had 48,000 followers, was suspended without notice by Meta three weeks ago.
“I received a horrible email saying a reference to child sexual exploitation content, which obviously was quite traumatic to see,” she said. “Saying my Instagram accounts have been disabled with just no clear explanation.”
Enticknap estimates that, as a result of her account being wrongly suspended, she has lost 80% of the bookings she otherwise would have leading into the busy wedding season in Margaret River.
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“A lot of people come through Instagram, they find hashtags and they find word of mouth, and obviously through other businesses that always tag us,” she said.
Enticknap said it made her realise how reliant she was on Meta for business. She said she lost two Instagram accounts and a Facebook account as a result of the permanent suspension, and said attempts to contact the company to have the ban appealed had resulted in a “dead end”.
She said she was not alone, citing another Western Australian business – which sells artificial flowers – which had been suspended from Meta platforms and received the same reference to child sexual exploitation.
“My friend who has another successful makeup business, she went down the week after me, but she’s managed to get her account back,” Enticknap said.
Incorrect account suspensions on social media platforms are not a new phenomenon. Often when Meta is asked by media about an account, it is later restored.
However, something changed in July.
A flood of emails were sent to journalists from people all over the world saying that, without warning, their Facebook and Instagram accounts had been suspended. Many were told – erroneously – by Meta that their accounts had been suspended for breaching community standards on child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.
Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected.
There are petitions with tens of thousands of signatures, a subreddit devoted to people who have had their accounts disabled and talk of a class action against Meta over the bans.
From around a dozen emails received in the past two weeks, Guardian Australia has reported five accounts – including Enticknap’s to Meta, which said it had internally escalated the investigation of those accounts.
Media reporting of the plight of businesses struggling as a result of their Instagram ban has led to many of those accounts being restored.
But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement.
“We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we’ve made a mistake,” a spokesperson for Meta said.
Meta is reliant on a mix of human reports and automation to find and remove accounts in breach of its rules. The company publishes data on how many accounts it removes – and data on how many it subsequently restores – in its quarterly community standards enforcement report.
However, the latest report only covers to the end of March, so it can’t yet be judged whether the company has had a significant uptick in removed accounts or appeals.
For Enticknap, the suspension carries an emotional weight. Her father died this year, and the photos and messages her father uploaded to Facebook cannot be accessed.
“I’ve tried to message and just say: ‘Can I just get my data? Can I just get that? Shut me down, but let me get those pictures back’,” she said.
“But nothing. I’ve not had any reply.”
