Fashion influencer Lauren Holifield opened up Instagram one day in February and was soon fighting the urge to throw up. “I was so nauseous,” she says. The account she uses to bring in a six-figure annual salary from marketing products to more than 100,000 followers had been banned—shutting off income she needed to support her family and help fund her daughter’s wedding. The app gave no indication why she had been booted.
Holifield texted her husband and pinged her IT assistant, then tearfully began to pray. “I literally thought my career was over,” she says. Only a tortuous week later did Holifield discover that on the day she was banned, Instagram sent three warnings to a secondary email on her account, each saying that someone had reported one of her videos from last year for trademark infringement.
Her followers had loved the three posts in which she adorned bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne with white paint and glued on paper butterflies and Christmas ornaments, a crafty gift idea. Holifield hadn’t mentioned the champagne brand or offered anything for sale, and similar videos can be found across the internet, but someone at Veuve had apparently reported her. Instagram’s emails stated, “Your offer of goods and/or promotion of the sale of goods infringes on their trademark rights.”
Holifield was left asking a question that has frustrated many users of Instagram and Meta’s other social platforms: How do I contact customer support? It can be a trial for anyone but is particularly biting for people like her. Meta has encouraged influencers to make a career out of posting on its platforms—and reaped the profits—but some say the company does not treat them professionally in return.
Holifield’s agent, Sharon Eva, who runs influencer marketing agency Fame by Influence, says she has helped hundreds of creators unfairly booted from their accounts over the past few years. Many of the bans appear to have been incorrectly applied automatically by software. But finding someone to appeal to is nearly impossible. “I don’t know why a company as large as Meta doesn’t have real customer service,” Eva says.
In one small-claims lawsuit filed against Meta in California last year, the owner of a landscaping business who lost his personal and business accounts to an apparent hack alleged, “Meta does not provide any phone number to reach a human being, or a valid e-mail to reach customer support. They make it impossible to get a hold of a human being.”
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the company provides support in various corners of its app and website—options that Eva contends she exhausted without making progress. “We know that losing access to an account can be frustrating,” Roberts says. “We are consistently working to improve the customer service experience on our platforms.”
Although Holifield got her Instagram account back in February after appealing to a representative of Veuve, she remained locked out of Meta’s ad manager, preventing her from resuming her work on sponsored posts. Her access wasn’t fully restored until WIRED contacted Meta this week about her situation. The company didn’t explain why it suddenly acted; Veuve did not respond to a request for comment.