'We lost business': Carlow woman hits out at Meta for disabling business accounts

A young woman from Carlow has hit out at Meta for 'ruining lives' of people who refuse to pay for verification because of the social media company's AI system. 

Destiny Ayo Vaughan is a public speaker and the founder of 'Mind the Gap,' which is an organisation that tackles sexual violence through anonymous stories shared online. 

She has two business accounts - one for her personal public speaking and another for the charity.

She remembers the day her personal account disappeared.

"On the 28th of October I realised that my account was completely disabled and I've had this account since I was like 14. It was coming up that it was disabled because I broke the guidelines and the guidelines I was coming up with were drugs and guns and substances which was completely false," Destiny explained. 

She didn't panic too much at the time as she thought it must have been an error and a few days later, her account was back.

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Now aged 27, Destiny was worried that she had lost 10 years of work when the account disappeared. 

She uses her personal Instagram account to promote her charity account and it was her personal one that got wrongfully disabled. 

"A lot of the time my personal account is what I use for branding. Without that it doesn't really work because I'm mostly the face of Mind the Gap Ireland. When the Instagram went it was kind of like we lost maybe 10 years worth of work and we had no way of contacting the people that we work with because it was all done through my personal account. It was kind of like we had lost the charity really," Destiny said. 

She reached out to Meta to explain the situation but they were originally refusing to give the account back. 

Eventually when they did, they disabled it again after a few days, and this cycle continued for roughly a week. 

"I had spoken to over 15 different people. I had over 15 different tickets open. Then when you pay for the Meta verified you can see if you had any violations and it turns out I had no violations at all. It was completely an error," Destiny said. 

When Meta responded, they admitted that their AI system made a mistake.

This is when Destiny started to realise that it wasn't happening to just her, but to multiple people who had business accounts.

"If you post anything where you are talking about specific topics they're going to disable your account. I was posting about like violence so gun violence especially with the war that's going on right now and child marriage and all that kind of stuff as well and that's why they were mistakenly disabling my accounts," she said. 

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"A lot of people can be accused of child sexual abuse as well. If you have a picture of a child on your Instagram and let's say you keep posting your child and you have a business account or creator's accoun, Meta will pull it for child sexual abuse, or let's say if you have a business account and you have a sister that has a child and she's posted her child and you like it, it's gonna flag," she added.

However, the issue is that Meta's enforcement system is run by AI and it cannot tell the difference between a real human and a bot. 

As a result, people across the world are losing their business accounts and livelihoods. 

Destiny shared a story of a woman who had a flower shop for 10 years and her booking system was run through social media.

Overnight, everything was gone as her account was wrongfully disabled. 

Another woman was accused of being a scammer after someone had made an order for something via her Instagram account and the next day, the account ceased to exist. 

The woman had no way to contact the person to explain that her account was disabled and she was being threatened with legal action. 

Destiny says these stories are extremely "disheartening," particularly when the people being affected are older.

"It's a lot harder for them to use other social platforms or to create something else. It's also happening on Facebook as well. It's any Meta platforms so that's Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram," Destiny said.

Many people rely on social media for their income as it supports their businesses by marketing, or they themselves are the product.

"A lot of people are really reliant on it because now you have stuff like TikTok shop where you can sell online now and that actually sells a lot more, because if you look at how many people shop online now, it's so easy. With the younger generation, they're using social media to buy, so you can buy on Facebook Marketplace, you can buy on Instagram, you can buy literally anywhere and it's a better market to sell from," she explained. 

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"For me, when I was a public speaker I found it easier to promote my charity online than to try and promote it in person. It was so much easier because I could connect with people that I would never be in a room with before, so it was easier to get speaking engagements doing it that way," Destiny added. 

What she doesn't understand is how people such as Bonnie Blue are not getting their accounts disabled. 

"She is a danger to society in my opinion but her account is allowed to be up," Destiny said.

She has set up a petition calling for Meta to hire humans as their customer support staff as using the AI system to tackle the issue "doesn't work." 

That can be viewed here.

She is also advocating for another bigger petition that has been up and running for a little while longer and has almost 50,000 signatures.

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Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been named as a decision maker on the petitions but he and the other ones named have failed to respond. 

Destiny feels as though those in power don't care about the effect its faulty AI system is having on people's lives. 

"I think that there are a lot of people that are quite vulnerable that are really reliant on this and if you just be like 'well, we're not going to win' and just take a seat back, it doesn't help those people," she said. 

"They don't want us to talk about certain things. If you're very vocal about certain topics as well it's kind of just like they want to take us off social media. The only thing that I had posted that had to do with anything that they were talking about was when I was posting about child marriage and wars and how wars impact sexual abuse, or how in trafficking they use substances to trap girls into these situations. That was the only time I've ever talked about any of these topics," Destiny said.

She feels as though Meta is using disabling accounts as a money trap so that people will pay for a verified account. 

Even though she didn't want to pay to verify her accounts, both Destiny's personal Instagram and her 'Mind the Gap' one are now verified as she was too worried about being disabled again.

The bigger petition Destiny spoke about has been up and running for over a year but continues to grow with new people signing it and sharing their stories of losing everything every week. 

That can be viewed and supported here.