The notification startled Camille Hanson awake one night this March. Her Facebook and Instagram accounts, where she had nearly 1 million followers running a business with her husband teaching English to non-native speakers, had been flagged for deletion. Meta said she had violated the community guidelines for fraud and deception.
“I’m just an English teacher,” Hanson, 40, remembered thinking. She was flummoxed by the fraud and deception claims. “What am I doing wrong?” she wondered.
The notice said she could appeal, so she clicked the button to begin the process. A week later, she got another notification: Her appeal was denied.
“All your information will be permanently deleted,” Meta’s response read. “You cannot request another review of this decision.”
It was like having “an actual physical business, and somebody just shuts down your office or your storefront,” Hanson’s husband, Calvin, 42, said in an interview from their home in Portugal.
What happened to the Hansons was a case of artificial intelligence (AI) gone wrong. The technology is increasingly responsible for deciding which accounts broke Meta’s content rules while also managing the appeals for those decisions. Adding to people’s distress, it is often difficult for users like the Hansons to reach anybody at the company to figure out what to do.
In March, Meta announced plans to hand more power to AI bots to decide which accounts to ban or harmful images to remove. Months later, the company laid off thousands of employees, including those who did those jobs.
Users have organised online, with more than 60,000 recently signing a petition asking Meta to provide more information about account bans and to let humans review appeals. Several communities on Reddit and elsewhere have been bombarded with complaints from Meta users about the company’s AI.
Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesperson, disputed that AI was worse at handling accounts than humans, and said the company’s new AI moderation tools make 13% fewer mistakes than human employees and find 10% more violations. Of the five accounts The New York Times flagged to Meta, all were banned by the company’s old AI moderation tools, Roberts said.
“We’re committed to making fewer enforcement mistakes and helping individuals protect their accounts – and AI is delivering on both,” he said.
Meta has grappled with several instances of AI going awry. In May, hackers exploited its AI customer service chatbot to attack 34,000 Instagram accounts, including a former White House account of Barack Obama’s. That same month, employees revolted over a program that tracked their keyboard movements to train AI, leading Meta to pause the effort.
Recently, 26 former Meta employees said in a lawsuit that the company had laid them off using an AI algorithm that targeted them for having disabilities. A Meta spokesperson said that “workforce management and organisational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
People Over Platforms, a user advocacy group that sells account recovery services, created the online petition this year to compel Meta to change its account moderation policies. Meta had accused many of the signers of sharing child exploitation material – a charge that users said added insult to injury – and then banned them.
That was the accusation Meta made against Athenia Rodney, the owner of JuneteenthNY, a group commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, when the company banned all of her personal and professional accounts on Facebook and Instagram last year.
“Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules,” the notice from Meta read. “As a result, our technology took action.”
Rodney said she did not understand Meta’s rationale because her group’s content is “family friendly.” After her accounts were banned, she sifted through JuneteenthNY’s photo archives to search for potential posts that could have triggered the AI bots, but found nothing.
Then Rodney recalled that shortly before Meta cancelled her accounts, the company had alerted her about suspicious logins from Seattle and Singapore – even though she lives in Atlanta. It was a sign that her accounts had been hacked.
Rodney had quickly changed her passwords, but six of her Instagram and Facebook accounts for various businesses and personal profiles were banned.
To get those accounts back, Rodney said she had submitted identification documents, filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission, reached out to state consumer protection offices and messaged Meta employees on LinkedIn. Nothing worked.
Since then, JuneteenthNY has had to convince sponsors that it is a legitimate organisation that has been around for nearly two decades.
“Our sponsors go to our social media page to confirm that we are a valid organisation, that we have been doing this for 17 years,” Rodney said. “So now, when they go to our account and they see 500 people, they’re like, ‘You haven’t been doing this – y’all are a fraud.’”
After the Times flagged the five banned accounts to Meta, the company said it investigated and found that two were the result of hacks and one was for a legitimate reason. The hacked accounts were rightfully banned because the hackers violated child safety policies, Meta said.
Meta then restored the two hacked accounts, including Rodney’s JuneteenthNY account. Two of the five accounts flagged were mistakenly banned, including those of the Hansons, the company said. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
