When Gigi Coloma was celebrating her birthday in June, her niece posted a photo on Instagram wishing her aunt a happy birthday. The post included a photo of the two of them taken a few years ago. She had used a Snapchat photo filter to add fangs and bat ears to their faces. “Happy Birthday, Tia. I love you,” it said.
Hours later, Coloma was out celebrating her birthday with friends. They were at a restaurant, snapping photos and posting them on social media. When she clicked on the Instagram app on her phone, she was told she had to log-in. When she tried, she was locked out — suspended.
An email from the social media giant said she was being investigated for “child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.”
“I thought somebody had reported me,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I must have a hater that hates me that much, who accused me of being a pedophile.’”
She was shut out of all of her social media accounts with Instagram and Facebook, including her professional accounts that she relied on for the bulk of her income as a realtor.
While worried, she was confident she could sort it out soon enough. Coloma returned to her birthday celebration and told herself she would take care of it the next day.
It would take three months of waiting and an email to Instagram's parent company, Meta, from WLRN before Coloma to resolve her dispute with the world’s biggest and powerful social media companies, but she has yet to learn what led to her suspension and is still waiting for an apology.
Her experience is not an isolated one. Complaints have spread on Reddit and other social media sites about Instagram suspending user accounts over accusations they have violated the social media giant’s Community Standards. The company doesn’t offer evidence or share specific posts that are in question. Users complain that Instagram’s appeals process is lengthy and opaque, and they lose followers, engagement and attention — currencies in the modern social media economy and beyond.
“ I've lost all of my contacts, my connections, my network,” Coloma told WLRN in early September. It had been almost three months since she appealed to Instagram to reinstate her account. She had heard nothing from the company.
Coloma admitted she was embarrassed by the accusation and for disappearing from social media with no warning nor trace. She was frustrated and growing more concerned about missing professional opportunities with her social media presence essentially erased.
Coloma has been a real estate agent since 2016. She has focused on upscale, luxury short-term rentals for several years, matching wealthy tourists usually with waterfront homes in Miami.
It is a business that thrives on social media to spread images of high-end villas and homes available for rent to clients from Brazil to Boston. The brokerage she works for posts images and videos on social media and short-term rental websites. Coloma shares them and potential customers reach out.
“A lot of clients contact me through DMs (direct messages) on Instagram,” she said. Clients “see my social media profile, see what I'm about” and reach out to her.
That virtual connection ended June 12 when Instagram locked her out of her accounts. The suspension included her Facebook accounts, too.
“I think AI must have gotten confused that I was abusing a minor, which is truly disgusting,” she said.
Community Standards
Instagram lists more than two dozen types of violations of its Community Standards. Promoting crime, fraud and self-harm are not allowed. Neither is hateful content, bullying and what it calls inauthentic behavior.
Coloma was accused of violating the site’s child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity ban. Through June Meta has taken action on almost 10 million instances of child sexual exploitation this year. That was down more than 60% from a year earlier. Almost all of the content is found by Instagram, rather than reported to the platform by other users.
As the number of instances has dropped, more users are appealing their accusations. Almost 1 million people who Instagram took action against for child sexual exploitation appealed during the first half of this year, representing a 22% increase from a year earlier.
While more users appeal their suspensions, Instagram has sharply increased the number of accounts it restores — without appeals.
The platform had been returning only about 50,000 cases every three months until this spring when it returned more than 500,000 cases between April and June, and most of those were restored without appeals. Similar spikes in restoring suspended accounts without appeals occurred at the end of 2022 and 2023. Such increases could be generated by changes to its technology used to detect violations
Meta acknowledges it uses artificial intelligence to review content posted on its sites. It claims its technology “proactively detects and removes the vast majority of violating content before anyone reports it.”
Meta describes its process for users to appeal notifications that they are suspected of violating its standards, however, the examples refer to individual social media posts and not entire accounts.
When reviewing content “where our technology misses something or needs more input,” Meta uses teams of reviewers to take a look and use their judgment to see if its AI got it wrong due to context or some other reason. The company said it has cut “enforcement mistakes” by 75% in the second quarter as a result of addressing efforts “to reduce over-enforcement.”
Still, it noted adult nudity and sexual activity “appeared to increase on Instagram due to improvements in our measurement of these violations.” It concluded, “There was no actual increase in views of the violating content.”
Meta does not describe what measurement improvements it made to lead to its conclusion.
During the same period Meta said it has significantly reduced its "enforcement mistakes," it has also significantly increased the number of accounts suspended for child endangerment but then restored without appeal.
The number of Meta users complaining to the Federal Trade Commission about being wrongfully locked out of their accounts began increasing during this same time period. There were only a half dozen such complaints in the first quarter of this year. It doubled in the second quarter and has been accelerating since July. Similar complaints have increased over the past seven years, according to FTC data shared with WLRN. The number of complaints with the FTC is a small fraction of the Instagram users Meta took action against for violating its standards.
The FTC notes the complaints have not necessarily been verified by the agency.
A summer off social media
Coloma waited for her appeal to Instagram, hoping to return to social media as soon as possible. A medical issue kept her laid up for several weeks after losing access to her Instagram accounts and she felt isolated and remote from her work.
Her social media blackout meant she missed out on business. The brokerage she works for announced a competition for agents. It wanted them to share Instagram reels of properties it provided. Agents with the most interactions would be eligible for a bonus. Coloma couldn’t participate while her Instagram account was suspended.
“The CEO asked me what was going on with my social media. Why I wasn't active. Why wasn't he able to find me?,” she said. “Then I had to explain it to him.”
" I don't exist," she said. "Username not found."
Coloma didn’t create a new account because she held out hope she would get her existing one, along with its 30,000 followers, reinstated. She estimated that she can trace 80% of her income as an agent to what begins as interactions on social media. “ It's very beneficial for you to put yourself out there for, to be seen, for people to be able to find you,” she said.
Coloma called it “the worst summer of business” blaming some of that on her inability to be on social media. “ I have lost contact with people who you keep in touch through social media,” she said.
READ MORE: Anxiety, social media: How loneliness strikes in a connected world — and in South Florida
Coloma, who grew up in Peru and came to Miami after graduating high school, worked in fashion sales before transitioning to real estate. She turned to one of her sisters on July 21 to contact Instagram support in hopes of clearing her name and getting her account back. It had been over five weeks since her account was suspended.
She was able to text with a representative of the platform’s Meta Pro Team. That person told Coloma that the review teams were “experiencing a high flow of reviews” and asked Coloma to “trust our team on this.” The Instagram support team member also texted, “I have full faith in your content.”
Coloma was relieved to read that but remained anxious about having her name cleared and getting her account restored. “I pray they know I am innocent,” she wrote.
Still, weeks went by without a resolution or communication from Instagram about what may have triggered its action. “ Every time I click on the Instagram app icon, I get the appeal notice,” she said.
And she continued to worry about the accusation. “It's a horrible accusation,” she said. “It's something that I feel is going to be in my background somehow — that I was accused of being a pedophile. It is disgusting.”
Inquiry and return
WLRN sent an email to Meta on Sept. 8. Twenty-five hours later, Coloma clicked open her email.
She had just finished a morning meditation when she checked her inbox.
“I was like, ‘Wow,’” she remembered.
It was an email from Facebook. The message was fewer than two dozen words. It informed Coloma that her account had returned after reviewing her appeal. “This means it can now be viewed publicly,” the note explained. It was signed “The Facebook Team.”
Coloma was thankful, but she also felt “completely gaslighted.” The email offered no explanation or what led to her suspension and the accusation of child sexual exploitation.
“I'm still waiting for that closure that I know I'm never gonna get,” she said a week after her account was restored.
Coloma was back on social media. She estimated she lost about 200 followers during her black-out and her engagement had been zeroed out. The most recent direct messages were from the night of her birthday, the night her account was suspended.
“ I have to create the momentum and I have to go back to creating content and just putting myself out there,” she said. “ God knows how many deals I've lost because people only knew me through social media.”
Meta did not respond to the email from WLRN inquiring about Coloma’s account.
