Last week, Instagram shut down my account over Palestine. That's clearly what happened,

as I'll explain. And there was a wider point here about censorship by meta of pro-Palestinian

content on both Instagram and Facebook, particularly I would note with Palestinians being targeted.

I'm using my own experience of something of a hook. I was trying to use my Instagram on my phone,

as you do, scrolling, looking at what was going on,

and it just stopped working.

You know, you tried to get up to date, and instead I was just getting it freezing and an error message.

So I logged into my email, and in big red letters, it read, take action or lose access to

Owen Jones Journo.

That's my handle.

It went on to say, hi, Owen Jones Jerno, your

Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account or activity on it doesn't

follow our community standards on dangerous individuals and organisations. If you think that we made

a mistake, you have until the 8th of October 2025 to appeal. Now then I went on to submit an appeal.

This was, I know, rather ominously phrased when I did that because it said if we find that

your account doesn't follow our community standards, it will be permanently disabled and you

won't be able to appeal again. So sudden irreversible death, years of building them an Instagram profile, building up a follower base, making contacts for people all over

the world, that would all be erased. It didn't actually tell me what content was the problem,

but it did say that it was because the suspension, because your account or activity on it

doesn't follow our community standards on dangerous

individuals and organisations. Well, my content is almost exclusively about Palestine, of course.

So this would suggest my account had been flagged on the grounds I was judged to support,

...