Meta falsely accuses Instagram user of breaking child exploitation rules

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

An Australian beautician says she is frustrated and disheartened after Meta suspended her business and personal accounts, falsely accusing her of posting child exploitation material.
The morning of the ban, Madison Archer posted a video capturing her life as a mother and businesswoman, including a brief shot of her holding her daughter.
She said she never posted anything untoward on her account and did not know what exactly triggered the suspension.
But shortly after the June 14 post, Ms Archer received an email that her business's Instagram account had been suspended.
Her case reflects a growing number of people in Australia and around the world complaining of harsh enforcement of account-banning and a lack of thorough review when mistakes are made.
The email Ms Archer received from Meta said she had not followed community standards on child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.
"When I saw the email I initially thought it was a scam, so I didn't open it," Ms Archer told the ABC.
"But when I logged into the Instagram app, a pop-up came up saying action was needed and I was like, 'What the hell?'
"I felt sick because I'm so conscious of protecting my daughter as it is that I would never do anything they were accusing me of."
In an effort to reinstate her account, she immediately appealed against the decision, believing the social media platform would see it was an error.
An email from Meta said it would take 24–48 hours to provide a response.
But within 15 minutes, an email said the appeal was unsuccessful and that the account would be permanently disabled on Instagram, leaving Ms Archer to suspect the process was entirely handled by AI.
"If a human actually did the review they would see that I'm not sexually exploiting children or haven't even looked at any of that stuff on my platform," she said.
Because all of Ms Archer's Meta platforms are linked, all her pages were suspended, including her personal Instagram and Facebook accounts.
An option to escalate her appeal was never given, and her access to the accounts was only restored after the ABC contacted Meta for comment.
When the accounts were disabled after the appeal, Ms Archer reached out to every Meta staff member whose contact details she could find in order to dispute the decision.
She said the process was "incredibly difficult".
"I had to create a new Facebook page and pay for Meta verification to even get in contact with a real person.
"When I did manage to talk to someone, I was always met with the same answer: that it's a separate team and that I need to wait for the system to cool down and then hopefully I'll be given another chance to re-appeal."
This advice seemed to contradict the initial information provided to Ms Archer when her first appeal failed — that further escalation would not be possible.
At one point, she was even temporarily banned from contacting the support team because it said she had reached her "limit".
"It's so disheartening that you put your trust in a platform that is designed to connect you with others, you follow the rules, and then your account can just be taken away with no proper support," she said.
In a bid to rebuild nine years' worth of work building up a customer and subscriber base, Ms Archer created a new Instagram account, but was only able to attract about 2,000 of her followers — 9,000 shy of the previous number.
"A lot of people that come across my profile were inclined to book [my business] from the portfolio of work they saw on my account.
"They were also able to see the large following I had which backed my reputation.
The ABC raised Ms Archer's case with Meta on July 15. Within hours, her account was reinstated.
In an email sent to Ms Archer, seen by the ABC, the tech giant said:
"We're sorry that we've got this wrong and that you weren't able to use Instagram for a while. Sometimes, we need to take action to help keep our community safe."
Before her account was restored, Ms Archer also went through the process of paying a third party.
She lost $1,500 to a scammer, who was referred to her by someone in the industry who is reputable and was successful in recovering their accounts.
When asked by ABC News, Meta declined to comment on Ms Archer's case.
"We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a Meta spokesperson said.
Ms Archer's social media account is not the only one to have been falsely accused of breaching community standards.
Other Australians contacted the ABC about the issue, including Katie, who said her personal Facebook account was suspended for "misrepresenting your identity".
Katie said she had always used her own name, profile picture, email and phone number on the account she created in 2007.
"I have 18 years of contacts on Facebook, which includes people from different cities and countries I've lived in, as well as deceased families and relatives," she said.
"I use Marketplace to buy, sell and swap household items and children's clothing for my young family."
In a similar case to Ms Archer, Katie said the Meta support team was "incredibly unhelpful".
"Sometimes I can't access any support, and then when I do, the tickets are closed without a resolution," she said.
"My account is still under review and it's been two and a half weeks with no updates."
More than 30,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta's moderation system of wrongly banning accounts and giving people no functional way to appeal.
Thousands of people are also in Reddit forums dedicated to the subject. Many users have also posted on social media platforms such as X about being banned.
Meta has previously acknowledged a "technical problem" with Facebook groups, but has denied its platforms are more widely affected.
It is understood Meta has not seen evidence of a significant increase in incorrect enforcement of its rules.
A Meta spokesperson did not answer ABC questions about why it wrongly accused Ms Archer of violating its policies.
But according to an X post from Korean National Assembly member Minhee Choi, Meta has acknowledged the possibility of wrongful suspensions of accounts in her country:
"Meta is currently conducting a global crackdown on activities related to child and youth pornography on social media platforms, including Instagram. During this process, they have acknowledged that some user accounts are being excessively blocked and are being restored sequentially, while they are working to identify specific issues," she said.
University of Melbourne deputy head of school of computing and information systems Shaanan Cohney said large companies such as Meta had been using AI to identify accounts in breach of their guidelines for many years.
"But what does change from time to time, though, is the specific AI techniques that they use," Dr Cohney said.
"What these large platforms are doing behind the scenes is they're collecting a whole bunch of things called signals that might be an indicator that something is wrong or dangerous about an account.
"Even if your account is innocent, but for some reason has a lot of these signals associated with it, it might be automatically picked up by one of these algorithms."
Exactly what goes into the latest version of these algorithms, how they change and when they change are not known to the public.
Dr Cohney said information like this was a "trade secret".
"You could say that the public should have a right to know what's in these algorithms because it can impact people pretty deeply because of the way in which these platforms are integrated into our lives," he said.
"But there is a legitimate counter to that.
"The effectiveness of these technologies to identify harmful behaviour is partially predicated on the ability of these companies to keep the methods secret so people can't devise tricky ways to get around them."
When it comes to appealing against a breach, Dr Cohney said major social media players had fairly opaque procedures for users which generally involved some sort of semi-automated process.
"It would be a very, very large undertaking to require a large company like this to provide everyone with a human appeal," he said.
Meta told the ABC it used a combination of people and technology to find and remove accounts that broke its rules.
Ms Archer is relieved to be posting content on her original business account again.
But the feeling of uncertainty that this could happen again remains.
"The fear of losing it again still sits heavy," she said.
"It's hard to fully relax when you've already seen how quickly it can be taken without warning.
"I'm following the rules, as I have always done, and will be keeping my backup account I created just in case."