Meta's "accidental" suspension of the No Kings Instagram account — at a time when the org was posting updates from ongoing marches — was not an anomaly. I found dozens of similar instances of Meta "mistakenly" targeting left-leaning activist accounts, often during crucial election windows. My latest.

What’s actually going on in Ukraine is that there is a massive incentive difference between the elites and the people. The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches.

Meta's "accidental" suspension of the No Kings Instagram account — at a time when the org was posting updates from ongoing marches — was not an anomaly. I found dozens of similar instances of Meta "mistakenly" targeting left-leaning activist accounts, often during crucial election windows. My latest.

Meta's "accidental" suspension of the No Kings Instagram account — at a time when the org was posting updates from ongoing marches — was not an anomaly. I found dozens of similar instances of Meta "mistakenly" targeting left-leaning activist accounts, often during crucial election windows. My latest.

We have continued to dig into the root cause here and would like to offer an update. Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s “reading” behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline. An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account. We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.

One of Putin's closest envoys sharing a meme of the USA and Russia attacking the UK and EU — 'Together'. Can we all see what is happening yet? 🤬

There is a difference between “coordinated inauthentic activity” on social media and “web crawlers.” The former are what people talk about when they are talking about “reply bots” and state-run “disinformation campaigns.” All major platforms have various prohibitions on such campaigns, and coordinated activity (including this garbage platform.) In general, it is difficult and costly to maintain automated social media accounts that bypass detection mechanisms used by platforms to curb such activity. Instead, such campaigns tend to rely on real humans, as they are cheaper, more varied in their response, and won’t get shut down by ToS violations. They also have to use VPNs or similar IP masquerading in order to avoid country-level blockages. Many platforms like X are not available in Russia, either, adding another technical hurdle for freelance actors. So other countries with low labor costs (India, Philippines, Indonesia, for example) may be employed instead. There is often no practical way to identify this traffic as inauthentic, until perhaps a major campaign pattern emerges, at which point it risks being shut down. Web crawlers, by contrast, are permitted activity and are used by major internet search providers such as Google and Yandex to “spider” the web and identify new web links and changes to sites. So that content providers know what this traffic is, they label themselves as “bots.” This is valid traffic. When you see a graph showing a sharp decline in “bot” traffic, it is indicating a change in this valid web crawling traffic. There is no one keeping graphs of “coordinated inauthentic activity” social media traffic; indeed if it was identifiable and graphable like this, it would already be shut down. So, blowing up data centers in Russia could conceivably hamper coordinated social media campaigns, if for some reason they had a dependency on services hosted there. But given the constraints on such campaigns, they are likely to be run from elsewhere. What has been disrupted, probably, is Yandex web crawler traffic. If one wishes, for optics, to honor the unilateral imposition of a “energy ceasefire,” blowing up datacenters is a good tactic and should be maximized. Blow them all up. But don’t pretend this has any meaningful impact on coordinated inauthentic social media activity. It does not, and is a different problem entirely. Pretending otherwise feeds magical thinking, incorrect ideas about how technology works, and reduces pressure on the adversary by claiming imaginary gains. Keep pressure up, and report gains clearly and correctly. If you want to go after social media campaigns, track them down, monitor their activity, and source their origins. Same as it ever was. Taking out datacenters is a nearly completely unrelated concern.