Meta has apologized and blamed an automated system that mistook an AI tool’s activity for bot traffic, and the attorneys general want written answers by Thursday on how the Menlo Park company will protect election-related speech.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined 13 other attorneys general in asking Meta to explain, in detail and in writing, why Instagram suspended the No Kings Coalition’s account for part of a nationwide day of action on Oct. 17, and what the Menlo Park company is doing to keep it from happening again before the Nov. 3 election.
The letter, dated Monday and addressed to Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, was led by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong. It asks for responses by Thursday, Oct. 29.
Meta’s explanation
Meta has not disputed that the suspension was a mistake. The day it happened, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X: “When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”
The next day, Stone offered a more technical account. “Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior,” he said, according to Business Insider. “Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17.” Those requests, he said, “resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems.” An automated re-review restored the account about an hour later, Stone said, adding: “It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account. We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”
Claude is an artificial intelligence model made by the San Francisco company Anthropic. Meta did not say how the coalition was using the tool.
The coalition, which has organized mass protests against President Trump and billed Oct. 17 as a day of early-voting events, said its page was unavailable for about 90 minutes and that organizers did not regain full access until 5:33 p.m. Eastern time, the Seattle Times reported, citing Bloomberg. The group said nearly 3,000 events took place that day. “Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable,” it said in a statement.
What the attorneys general are asking
Meta’s own explanation is the letter’s starting point. That account, the attorneys general wrote, “suggests that Meta is unable to differentiate between legitimate political activity and ‘bot’ activity that harms users,” a concern they called particularly pressing “given the proliferation of AI agents marketed to consumers, including by Meta, as compatible with social media accounts.”
The five sets of questions ask Meta to describe the Claude tool it detected; say when it learned of the suspension and what it did to fix it; explain whether humans were involved in suspending and restoring the account; lay out its policies for suspending accounts based on activity volume; identify any other legitimate election-related accounts suspended on Instagram or Facebook this election cycle; and describe how it will separate legitimate political activity, including activity carried out through AI agents, from harmful bot traffic, as well as how users can appeal unjust suspensions quickly.
“This is not Meta’s first election cycle,” Tong said in a statement. “The company should be able to handle a legitimate surge in online traffic related to a widely publicized day of action. The fact that they could not raises serious questions as to how prepared the company is to protect legitimate election-related activity on its platform.”
Bonta framed his participation around California users. “Millions of Californians rely on social media to organize, read news, and obtain information about upcoming elections,” he said in a statement. “My office is committed to ensuring communication platforms like Meta remain open for robust political speech, particularly so during critical election cycles.”
Tong’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Inquirer.
What a letter can and cannot do
Procedurally, the letter is a request, not a subpoena or a lawsuit, and it does not cite a specific statute Meta may have violated. Its weight comes from who signed it: the chief law enforcement officers of 13 states and the District of Columbia, including California, where Meta is headquartered and where the attorney general enforces state consumer protection and privacy laws.
The signers are Tong, Bonta and the attorneys general of New York, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. All lead Democratic offices; no Republican attorney general signed.
Others in Washington are asking similar questions. Five Democratic senators, including Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Ron Wyden of Oregon, wrote to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Oct. 22 seeking answers by Oct. 29, and Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland requested a briefing by Nov. 9. Meta’s own Oversight Board, in an Oct. 20 statement, cited “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts.”
Complaints about platform enforcement have historically come from both directions. For years, Republican officials accused major platforms of suppressing conservative voices, a dispute that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri in 2024, when the justices ruled the challengers lacked standing to pursue their claims of government pressure on platforms. The common thread is how little the public can see of automated decisions that switch political speech off and on.
With Election Day six days away, Thursday’s deadline gives Meta little time, and the attorneys general little leverage beyond publicity, if the answers are thin.
Graham Ostrowski covers the governor, the Legislature, state agencies and the state budget for the Sacramento Report. More from Graham Ostrowski
