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A Hamilton entrepreneur was scrambling to get her five social media accounts back after Meta suddenly disabled them over three weeks ago for no apparent reason, putting her home cooking business on hold.
“I was bawling, I’m beside myself,” said Najwa Cagnin. “It erases you from existence.”
For the past five years, Cagnin, 51, has been posting her recipes — often Italian and Arabic-inspired — for over 15,000 followers primarily on Instagram, but also Facebook. Home Cooking with Naj has led her to catering and cooking for private events, and deals with big brands, she said. She also took part in the Food Network’s Wall of Chefs competition in 2022.
So when she uploaded a few old photos of her husband and kids to her story on July 18, she said she didn’t think much about it.
Moments later, all her business and personal Instagram and Facebook accounts suddenly disappeared, as well as the one she manages for her son’s football team.
An automated message on the Instagram app said her account had been taken down. While an Instagram message said she didn’t have “any violations,” the social media site directed her to read its community standards page “to learn what we allow.”
“I’m a mom with three kids posting recipes — and I’ve broken community guidelines?” Cagnin said. “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”
She submitted an appeal that day through the app and has sent emails to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, but as of Monday afternoon, hadn’t heard anything back.
Not only did she lose access to as many as 600 recipes and videos, as well as countless personal photos, she also couldn’t message with clients or fulfil a brand deal worth thousands of dollars, she said.
“Part of that is my fault for not having a website,” she said. “But you take stuff for granted sometimes — I’m busy.”
On Monday evening, after CBC Hamilton had reached out to Meta for comment, her accounts were restored.
Meta looking into what happened
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, Threads and WhatsApp, told CBC Hamilton it hasn’t seen evidence that an increased number of accounts have been wrongly suspended.
“We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we’ve made a mistake,” a spokesperson said in an email.
A number of people have spoken out in recent months about losing access to their Meta accounts and wrongly being accused of violating its community standards.
A teacher in Vaughan, Ont., had her account suspended and was falsely accused by Meta of posting material it said depicted “child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity,” as reported by CBC Toronto this month. After CBC reached out to the company for comment, her account was reinstated and she received an apology.
Brittany Watson in Peterborough, Ont., started an online petition to “hold Meta accountable for wrongly disabled accounts” in May after she was also temporarily banned. Nearly 36,000 people have signed it, as of Monday.
The petition also calls for Meta to fix its artificial intelligence that’s moderating and disabling accounts.
There’s no hard proof AI is the reason why accounts are being wrongly suspended, but Instagram has said it’s being used to moderate content along with thousands of human reviewers around the world.
“Artificial intelligence technology is central to our content review process,” says Instagram’s help centre page. “AI can detect and remove content that goes against our community standards before anyone reports it. Other times, our technology sends content to human review teams to take a closer look and make a decision on it.”
AI can recognize what’s in a photo, such as nudity or graphic content, or analyze text, it said.
“Over time—after learning from thousands of human decisions—the technology gets better,” Instagram said.
‘You can’t get a hold of anybody’
On Meta’s website, it says for most violations, people are given up to five warnings for harmful content and then receive a 30-day account suspension or have it removed permanently depending on “the severity and frequency of the violations.”
Content that’s not allowed, according to Meta, includes anything that promotes fraud, scams, dangerous organizations, crime, violence, bullying, hate, misinformation, inauthentic behaviour, child and adult exploitation or sexually explicit material, among other categories.
For Cagnin, she said she still doesn’t understand why her accounts were suspended as she’s been careful to avoid posting anything that could be viewed as controversial or political. The last several posts she made were all about one thing: cooking.
If Meta is using AI to try to make its platforms better, Cagnin said it should also offer users a quick way to resolve errors, which has not been the case for her.
“You can’t get a hold of anybody. You can’t e-mail anybody. You’re literally at a loss,” she said.