After Facebook’s name change to Meta and the subsequent account suspension of an artist who had been using the Instagram handle ‘Metaverse for nearly a decade, her account was disabled.
The account was created by Australian Thea Mai Bauman in 2012. It documents her time studying fine arts in Brisbane and her travels to Shanghai where she founded an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers.
Her creative work was also posted under the @metaverse handle. She had less than 1,000 followers by the time Facebook’s parent company announced that Meta would be its new name.
Thea Mai Bauman was an artist whose Instagram account had been called ‘Metaverse for nearly a decade’. Her account was disabled after Facebook changed its name to Meta.
Five days later, and having received messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle, as well as one saying: ‘fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it’, Bauman found that her account had been disabled.
The screen displayed a message that read “Your account was blocked because you pretend to be somebody else”.
“This account represents a decade in my life. I didn’t want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet,’ Baumann told the New York Times.
Facebook rebranded its parent company in October and now goes by the name Meta.
Meta is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the company’s transformation into shared augmented realities, in which users can work and play within virtual worlds.
Zuckerberg attempted to discredit the social media giant from mounting scandals. This was after whistleblower documents revealed that its platforms had caused harm and inflamed anger.
But Baumann’s treatment has further enraged critics, some of whom said it illustrated the power and control Meta wields over individual user accounts with its various policies and algorithms.
Rebecca Giblin from the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (University of Melbourne) stated that Facebook has the essentially unlimited discretion to take people’s Instagram user name.
Bauman (pictured), used the @metaverse handle and had less than 1,000 followers. Facebook made the announcement at the end October that it would change its name to Meta
Elle added that the @metaverse example demonstrates the power of Facebook and that users are essentially deprived of any rights under Facebook policies.
Baumann finally got her account back a month ago after appealing to Instagram.
The social media company’s spokesperson said that it was incorrectly deleted for impersonation and added: “We are sorry for this error.”
It was not explained why the flagging had occurred for impersonation.
Instagram refused to answer any further questions regarding whether the account had been disabled due to its association with Facebook’s Rebranding.