Artist whose Instagram handle was ‘Metaverse’ for nine years had her account DISABLED days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta
- Instagram account with ‘Metaverse’ handle disabled after Meta name change
- Artist Thea-Mai Bauman created the account in 2012 and had 1,000 followers
- But it was disabled when Instagram’s parent firm Facebook changed its name
- Instagram later restored it; said it was ‘incorrectly removed for impersonation’
An artist whose Instagram handle was ‘Metaverse’ for almost a decade had her account disabled days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta, it has emerged.
Australian Thea-Mai Bauman created the account in 2012 to document her life studying fine art in Brisbane, as well as her trips to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality firm called Metaverse Makeovers.
She used the handle @metaverse alongside her creative work and had fewer than 1,000 followers when Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, announced at the end of October that it was changing its name to Meta.
Artist Thea-Mai Bauman, whose Instagram handle was ‘Metaverse’ for almost a decade, had her account disabled days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta, it has emerged
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.
A message on the screen read: ‘Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else’.
‘This account is a decade of my life and work. 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 refers to the ‘metaverse’, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the company’s transition into shared augmented reality, where users work and play in virtual world environments.
The announcement was made as Zuckerberg tried to distance the social media behemoth from mounting scandals after leaked whistleblower documents claimed its platforms harmed users and stoked 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.
‘Facebook has essentially unfettered discretion to appropriate people’s Instagram user names,’ Rebecca Giblin, director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at the University of Melbourne, told the New York Times.
Bauman (pictured) used the handle @metaverse and had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook announced at the end of October that it was changing its name to Meta
She added that ‘the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of this power’ and that under Facebook’s policies, users ‘essentially have no rights’.
Baumann’s account was finally restored a month after she first appealed to Instagram.
A spokesman for the social media giant said it had been ‘incorrectly removed for impersonation’, adding: ‘We’re sorry this error occurred’.
No explanation was given as to why it had been flagged for impersonation.
Instagram also refused to answer further questions about whether it was disabled because the account was linked to Facebook’s rebranding.