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Camille Hanson built an Instagram business teaching English to nearly 1 million followers. Meta deleted the account earlier this year over false claims of fraud and deception. “It’s like a grieving event, you know,” Ms. Hanson said. “A lot of crying.”
Roberto Suarez, an influencer who wants to make a career on social media, grew his Instagram following to more than 500,000. Meta deleted his account last year. “I was in shock,” he said.
Athenia Rodney runs JuneteenthNY, a group commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. After 17 years of activism, Meta deleted her account, citing child sexual abuse material. “Everything that we do is family friendly,” she said.
The notification startled Camille Hanson awake one night this March. Her Facebook and Instagram accounts, where she had nearly one million followers running a business with her husband teaching English to nonnative speakers, had been flagged for deletion. Meta said she had violated the community guidelines for fraud and deception.
“I’m just an English teacher,” Ms. 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,” Ms. Hanson’s husband, Calvin, 42, said in an interview from their home in Portugal.
Camille and Calvin Hanson at home in Viana Do Castelo, Portugal. They run a business on Instagram teaching English to nonnative speakers.Credit...Daniel Rodrigues for The New York Times
What happened to the Hansons was a case of artificial intelligence 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 A.I. 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 organized 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 A.I.
Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesman, disputed that A.I. was worse at handling accounts than humans, and said the company’s new A.I. moderation tools make 13 percent fewer mistakes than human employees and find 10 percent more violations. Of the five accounts The New York Times flagged to Meta, all were banned by the company’s old A.I. moderation tools, Mr. Roberts said.
“We’re committed to making fewer enforcement mistakes and helping individuals protect their accounts — and A.I. is delivering on both,” he said.
Meta has grappled with several instances of A.I. going awry. In May, hackers exploited its A.I. 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 A.I., leading Meta to pause the effort.
Last week, 26 former Meta employees said in a lawsuit that the company had laid them off using an A.I. algorithm that targeted them for having disabilities. A Meta spokesman said that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not A.I.”
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.”
Ms. 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 photos that were posted elsewhere on Facebook to see if they could have triggered the A.I. bots, but found nothing.
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Athenia Rodney, the owner of JuneteenthNY. She said she did not understand why Meta banned her Facebook and Instagram accounts.Credit...Elias Williams for The New York Times
Then Ms. Rodney recalled that shortly before Meta canceled 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. Six of her Instagram and Facebook accounts for various businesses and personal profiles were banned.
To get those accounts back, Ms. 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 organization that has been around for nearly two decades.
“Our sponsors go to our social media page to confirm that we are a valid organization, that we have been doing this for 17 years,” Ms. 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.’”
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With a limited social media presence, JuneteenthNY has had to convince sponsors that it is a legitimate organization with a long history.Credit...Elias Williams for The New York Times
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 Ms. Rodney’s JuneteenthNY account. Two of the five accounts flagged were mistakenly banned, including those of the Hansons, the company said.
Roberto Suarez, an Instagram influencer who had built a following of more than 500,000 users before he was banned this year, was one of those who received an email from Meta that his account was restored — along with his photos, followers, messages and more. He started posting content again to fans who had not heard from him in months.
A few weeks later, Meta sent him another email. “Your account has been suspended,” it read, claiming he had violated copyright laws on his content. “If you don’t take action, your account will be permanently disabled.”
Mr. Suarez denied violating any copyright. Shortly after The Times asked about the new ban, his account was restored again.
Ms. Hanson also received an email from Meta that her account was back. “We reviewed your account and found that the activity on it does follow our community standards on fraud and deception, so you can use Instagram again,” the message read. “We’re sorry we got this wrong.”
Stuart A. Thompson writes for The Times about online influence, including the people, places and institutions that shape the information we all consume.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: When Empowered A.I. Makes Errors. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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