‘I was very hurt’: Meta says ‘oops’ after accusing a teacher of child exploitation

A high school history teacher in Vaughan, Ontario, recently went through a very upsetting situation when her Instagram account was suspended by Meta.

Meta owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads. Megan Conte was wrongly accused of posting content related to child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity. The accusation was especially shocking and painful for Conte, given her job as a teacher.

Conte told CBC Toronto, “When I read what I was accused of, I was very hurt. I was very surprised, especially considering what I do for a living… And there was no one I could contact — no human… “I think the robots need to be reset.” Conte explained how hard it was to get in touch with an actual person at Meta to fix the problem. Even though she kept trying, her account was not restored right away.

It was only after CBC Toronto reached out to Meta about her complaints that her Instagram account was unlocked within hours. After her account was reinstated, Meta apologized to Conte, but it was more of an excuse than a true apology. Meta wrote, “We’re sorry we got this wrong and that you were unable to use Instagram for a while. Sometimes we need to take action to keep our community safe.” However, Conte is still worried that these kinds of sudden, hard-to-reverse decisions by social media moderators are not rare.

AI is making big mistakes when it comes to finding child abuse

Her experience reflects a bigger frustration among social media users about how much companies seem to rely on artificial intelligence for content moderation instead of human judgment. Brittany Watson from Peterborough, Ontario, started an online petition about this exact issue after she was also banned by Meta in May for reasons she never understood.

Even though her ban was lifted after two weeks, Watson’s petition has gained a lot of international support, with over 34,000 signatures from people around the world who have had similar experiences. Watson argues that social media is now a big part of everyday life, and having access suddenly taken away without explanation is a serious problem.

Her petition and her website, “People over Platforms,” are pushing for social media companies to be more accountable and for moderation tools to be better at detecting real wrongdoing. Watson believes the automated systems need a major overhaul, saying that “the robots need to be reset.”

While neither Watson nor Conte have absolute proof that AI alone caused their mistaken bans, the fact that these incidents keep happening suggests automated systems are involved. Tech expert Carmi Levy, based in London, Ontario, agrees, explaining that it would be impossible for Meta to use only human moderators since it has over three billion regular users. Levy says automation is the only way these platforms can function at such a huge scale, but he also describes the current situation as “automation out of control.”