Dog video on Instagram costs Aussie business owner $50k
Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australia, a retailer of high-quality fitness equipment, says she was notified of the suspension through an email from Instagram's parent company, Meta.
It said her accounts had been suspended because the clip, posted on her personal profile, breached community guidelines related to 'child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity'.
However, she claims the post was mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator, which believed the dogs in the clip were actually children.
'I was confused, but I wasn't overly worried. It seemed like such a silly mistake, and I assumed it would be sorted out straight away,' Ms Marinato tells news.com.au.
As the video was shared on her personal profile, she had 'no idea' her business account would be affected.
But the message told her it was, for being 'associated with an account that breached community guidelines'.
It's understood that Meta uses a combination of people and technology to find and remove accounts that break its rules.
In addition to using technology to proactively detect violating content, Meta also leverages it to identify signals of potentially suspicious behaviour, such as when people search for violating child safety terms.
Different actions are taken depending on the strength and number of these signals, which may include account restrictions or complete removal.
Although she was initially concerned about the suspension, Ms Marinato says she was hopeful the appeals process would be 'authentic and honourable,' and that once a human reviewed her case, the decision would be quickly overturned.
However, due to the lengthy appeal process, Ms Marinato said her business suffered a serious financial blow.
'Instagram is a critical marketing platform for any small business, especially one in the pilates and wellness industry that relies heavily on social media for visibility and sales,' she explained.
'We missed out on several major opportunities that could have increased revenue, most notably an influencer with 1.2 million followers who tried to promote our products and made the comment that our business 'couldn't be found'.'
From a reputation perspective, she described the situation as 'damaging,' as customers believed the business had closed or done something wrong to be removed from Instagram.
She estimated the suspension caused her around $50,000 in losses, with her revenue dropping by around 75 per cent.
'It was extremely stressful, being the sole provider for my family. This sudden drop in income, combined with the feeling that resolving the issue was impossible, caused immense anxiety,' she said.
A Meta spokesperson told news.com.au, 'We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake'.
Ms Marinato said she contacted Meta Support over '20 times' but only received generic and robotic responses.
She also reached out to the Meta Oversight Board, an organisation that provides independent checks on Meta's content moderation.
She then spoke to IT and marketing experts and even hired a lawyer to contact Meta, but she says none of this led to a genuine response or progress in overturning her suspension.
After three weeks of trying to regain access to her account, she finally engaged a third-party service that, for a fee, was able to restore her business account.
Now, she's calling on the platform to do better.
'The hardest part of this whole experience was that there was simply no course of action,' she shared.
'Meta has no contact number, no email address, no live chat, and most importantly, no human support.
'If I had just been able to speak to a human being, this would have been resolved immediately with little impact on my livelihood.'
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