A Montreal business owner is looking for an explanation from Meta after he lost access to his company’s Instagram and Facebook accounts for a month.
Amir Hosseini is the founder and director of Funktasy Inc., a company that oversees a music magazine and several record labels. On Sept. 11, Funktasy’s Instagram account was taken down and its Facebook page was restricted after Meta’s automated moderation tools wrongly flagged Hosseini’s personal page for “child sexual exploitation” — an accusation for which Meta would later apologize.
“Our technology found your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action,” read the initial notice from Meta, which Hosseini shared with CBC News. Meta is the parent company of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads and messenger WhatsApp.
Instagram took down the Funktasy account — which has almost 98,000 followers — as well as Hosseini’s DJ account and a memorial account for his dog, while Facebook restricted his access to the Funktasy page. When he filed appeals with both sites, he says Meta informed him the ban was related to his personal Facebook page.
Hosseini joins a growing number of Canadians who’ve had personal and business accounts mysteriously suspended by the tech giant, cutting off contact with customers, family and friends.
Hosseini, who is also a DJ and producer under the moniker Hoss, says the “serious false and defamatory allegation” was devastating to his artistic career and business operations. He says it took years to build an online following for Funktasy and he estimates he spent upwards of $20,000 advertising it on Meta platforms.
“We want to wipe out this accusation,” Hosseini told CBC News last week. “I have zero criminal history, nothing, to be labelled with the worst of the worst.”
He says that when he contacted Meta’s fraud team, its hacked accounts team and its escalation accounts team, he received only automated responses. Hosseini has since been engaged in a frustrating back-and-forth with the tech giant.
“There’s no human to basically support us in these times of such a harsh accusation to say, ‘Let’s look into it,’ ” he said. “There’s no support, nothing.”
After CBC News reached out to Meta for an explanation, the company responded to Hosseini and reinstated his accounts last Thursday. But it then suspended Funktasy’s Instagram again the following day, saying it “still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on sexualization of children,” without providing a more detailed explanation.
On Monday, Instagram again reinstated the account with an apology via email, saying, “We’re sorry we got this wrong and that you weren’t able to use Instagram, for a while. Sometimes we need to take action to help keep our community safe.”
To get a line to human customer service, Hosseini signed up for a $171/month Verified Page subscription Monday, which he says effectively amounts to “buying insurance.” Meta advertises the service as a way for clients to “request a call from an agent.”
After speaking with a human at Meta on Tuesday, Hosseini says he still got no explanation for what triggered the suspension. As of Tuesday afternoon he said he was still unable to log into his company’s Instagram account, even though it’s back online.
Meta has not responded to requests for comment from CBC News.
Meta has mistakenly banned other accounts
Numerous other Canadian businesses have been caught up in Meta’s automated bans with no explanation.
One Hamilton entrepreneur lost five social media accounts in August after Meta suddenly disabled them, putting her home cooking business on hold for weeks, for reasons she said were never made clear to her.
“I was bawling, I’m beside myself,” Najwa Cagnin told CBC Hamilton at the time.
Laurie Viau Gillard, co-owner of Amuse Kitchen & Wine, a small restaurant in Kanata, Ont., had her Facebook and Instagram accounts suspended for a week in September for unknown reasons, which she says caused “sheer panic.”
The Funktasy case is also not the first time Meta has wrongly levied the “child sexual exploitation” accusation.
In August, Megan Conte, a high school teacher in Vaughn, Ont., lost her Instagram account for several days after Meta accused her of posting material that it said depicted “child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.” She said she had no idea what triggered the suspension.
Meta apologized to Conte and unlocked her account hours after CBC Toronto contacted the company.
A history teacher in Vaughan, Ont., had her Instagram account reinstated after it was mistakenly shut down by Meta. As CBC’s Sarah MacMillan explains, the incident highlights emerging problems as AI replaces human moderators.
‘Up a creek without a paddle’
London, Ont.-based tech expert Carmi Levy says people are constantly messaging him to say their business accounts have been suspended “for reasons that often don’t make any sense and certainly aren’t explained.”
He says he suspects these accounts are being wrongly flagged by an AI tool, not a real human being. Levy notes that replacing human content moderators and custom service agents with AI is an industry trend that saves companies money — at the expense of users who rely on the tools.
“It’s like a customer service catch-22. You don’t know what happened, so you don’t know what you need to fix, but you also can’t reach anyone who can help you fix it in the first place,” he said. “So you’re up a creek without a paddle.”
Levy says social media platforms often have unclear terms of service written in “complex legalese,” which gives automated tools ample room to make judgment calls about what is and is not acceptable.
“If you are running a business here in Canada, you might want to think twice about putting all of your eggs in one platform’s social media basket. Because if the company decides to turn off that account against your will, it might be lights out for your business,” he said.
Levy advises business owners to diversify their online presence and use multiple tools and platforms from different companies.
Hosseini says the ordeal has affected his physical and mental health and the reputation of his business has suffered because his accounts were offline for more than a month.
“If big companies like Meta want to use [AI], fine, but at least they can leave a channel of human interaction or human support behind us, so these matters could be solved,” Hosseini said.
“It’s unfair to us, and to anyone else that goes through this.”
