Dog picture posted to Instagram costs an Australian woman $50,000

Daily Mail​

15-07-2025

An Australian small business owner says she lost about $50,000 after Instagram suspended her accounts over what she describes as an innocent photo of three dogs.
Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australiarecently received an email from Instagram's parent company Meta stating her accounts had been suspended because the image breached community guidelines relating to 'child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.'
The photo had been mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator, which confused the image of the dogs with those of children.
She appealed the decision and sent 22 emails to Meta, but received no assistance from the global tech giant, which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp.
Ms Marinato told Daily Mail Australia the suspension had a serious financial impact on her business.
'When it first happened I thought it was just a silly mistake and we'll fix it and it might take an hour,' she said.
'We were in the middle of the end of financial year sales for the business so it was pretty horrendous timing.
'I appealed and pretty quickly I received notification from Meta that my accounts were permanently disabled with no further course of action available.'
Left with few options, Ms Marinato said she was forced to take an unconventional route and pay a third party to get the accounts reinstated.
'I spent three weeks researching how to get my account back. In that time our revenue dropped by 75 per cent,' she said.
'For a small business like us, social media is critical. Everything just stopped when our accounts were suspended.
'In losing my account, all my Instagram advertising was gone. It had a really significant impact on the business because we rely so heavily on social media.'
She claims the sudden disappearance from the platform had a direct cost to her bottom line.
'I did a basic comparison to last year, just so I could be sure of the figures, and it cost me about $50,000,' she said.
But beyond the financial loss, Ms Marinato said she was outraged by the implication behind the platform's suspension notice.
'It's a horrible, disgusting allegation to have thrown your way and to be associated with. People will think we've done something wrong to lose our account,' she said.
'It's scary that AI has this power and also gets it this wrong. We could be on a slippery slope.'
Despite losing $50,000, Ms Marinato said she was now only focusing on getting her business back to where it was before Meta's AI intervened.
'I don't think anyone's been successful in recoupling any loss and that would be an extra expense. I just need to keep working hard and hope this doesn't happen again,' she said.
Ms Marinato claimed her story was just one of many and that the problem was widespread.
She also said it was impossible to talk to a human at Meta to explain her situation.
'I couldn't get a human to look at it. Clearly any human that looks at this photo is going to know it's completely innocent,' she said.