Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/meta-x-no-kings-elections-protests-midterms-free-speech-us-brazil/

For all our billionaire social media leaders’ claims to be free speech warriors, they seem to have spent the last few days cracking down on it.

As the midterm elections approach—a high-stakes race not only for both parties but for Silicon Valley, which faces the prospect of AI regulation under a Democratic House and Senate—reports are streaming in that suggest major social media and messaging platforms have become distinctly political in their enforcement.

Meta suspended No Kings’ Instagram account for several hours during the latest series of demonstrations on Saturday, meant to mobilize voters and encourage early voting in the midterms. Andy Stone, a company spokesperson, acknowledged an “incorrect enforcement” in a post Sunday, writing that the company’s systems detected “intense” activity by a Claude AI tool reading profiles and posts that the firm contended resembled automatic bot traffic, prompting an automatic trigger to shut down the account.

Although Meta re-reviewed the removal an hour later and recognized it was done in error, it took “additional time” for the company to get the account back up.

Similar issues reached beyond the United States.