Meta is allegedly deleting LGBTQ business Instagram accounts

Up until Oct. 3, Los Angeles-based lingerie brand Cantiq had over 100,000 followers on Instagram. Designer and owner Chelsea Hughes told Mashable that Instagram was its number one source of traffic and revenue — the lifeblood of the gender- and size-inclusive brand.

Then, seemingly without warning, Instagram owner Meta banned the account, and Hughes’ personal Facebook was also suspended. The account was restored on Oct. 9, but not before personal strife from Hughes and public scrutiny, including Mashable reaching out to Meta about the incident.

“I can’t even get into…the Meta Business Manager app,” Hughes told Mashable on a phone call while the account was down. “I can’t access anything. So ten years of work down the drain.”

Hughes believed this was the work of discriminatory AI. In March, Meta announced plans to enforce its content guidelines with advanced AI models. 

“If you are a 3X and you’re wearing the same bra as another person in an extra small, that AI will scan and say that that 3X person is showing more skin just because they have a larger body,” she said. “It is not about them being more sexual. It is not about them selling sex or anything like that. It’s just based on the fact that there are more square inches on their skin than on a smaller size, and that’s just not fair.”

Cantiq is one of many businesses facing these takedowns. In the last few months, numerous gay bars and nightclubs in Los Angeles and Austin have also reported that Meta has removed their business accounts. 

Thick Enterprises, which platforms, showcases, and trains dancers in larger bodies, also had their Instagram account removed recently. It was restored around the same time as Cantiq’s account. Chantal, its co-owner and experiential director (who declined to give her last name), told Mashable while the account was down that she believed this was “a targeted puritanical culling of fat and queer spaces.”

“The fact that it has happened in these last two months, you’re like, oh yeah, this is definitely queer erasure. This is fatphobia. This is taking marginalized groups and labeling them as sexual deviants, and that’s incredibly dangerous,” Chantal said.

On Oct. 9, Meta told Mashable via email that it enforces its policies regardless of the account holders or the type of content they post, and linked to its sexual solicitation and sexually explicit language policy outlining the types of content that can lead to enforcement. (Both Hughes and Chantal said they work to keep their content compliant with Meta’s policies.)

“It has felt like 1984”

LGBTQ accounts, accounts of sex workers, sex educators, reproductive activists, and the like have made similar claims over the years: Instagram banned them despite following its community guidelines. There have also been many accusations of shadowbanning, or not being seen in Instagram’s Search or Explore pages. (Instagram has denied that shadowbanning exists.)

Now, it seems that Meta’s bans are coming for LGBTQ and plus-sized-focused businesses.

Nonprofit Repro Uncensored (RU) gathers reports of Meta banning accounts, and it’s getting these reports pretty constantly at this point, its executive director, Martha Dimitratou, told Mashable over the phone. Between March and Oct. 2026, RU recorded approximately 905 cases of digital censorship globally, she said, including 135 in the U.S. In Aug. and Sept. alone, RU received 275 reports worldwide, including 60 in the U.S.

Supporting marginalized and progressive accounts isn’t a priority of big tech, especially in this political climate, Dimitratou added.

“Meta is fully aware of this problem and yet it continues, over and over, to suspend LGBTQ accounts that are not in violation of its policies,” a GLAAD spokesperson told Mashable over email. “Rather than committing to solving the systemic problem, and ensuring its AI moderation systems are not flagging LGBTQ language and resources as violative, the company restores an account only after a public outcry.”

This is what happened to Precinct, a bar in Los Angeles. Its Instagram account was restored after its general manager, Jeremy Lucido, and others urged Precinct’s patrons to contact Meta.

“We have been targeted, and we’ve been left with very few real resources or ways to get help,” Lucido told Mashable over email. 

Platforms like Meta have created a system where businesses like Precinct depend on social media to reach their customers and community, but when something goes wrong, they’re repeatedly shut out of the channels they rely on to operate, he continued.

“Meta’s users, creators, and advertisers are entitled to have the company’s products function safely and fairly. They deserve an explanation and implementation of an actual solution. Meta must fix this problem, now.”

Hughes told Mashable that, before the ban, several words in Cantiq’s bio were flagged — but that the only words in the bio were “queer,” “body positive,” and the size range of Cantiq’s clothes (6X to XS). She requested a review of this, and a few days later, the account was gone.

“I’m banned from the platform with no recourse, no specifics. Just, ‘You violated our community standards, and now you’re banned,'” she said prior to the account restoration. Since she couldn’t repeal the decision because whenever she tried to log into her account, she received an error message, she asked followers on her personal account to contact Meta, and also reported the incident to RU. She even paid for the highest level of verification on her personal account to get enhanced support.

Chantal, meanwhile, woke up on Aug. 27 to find the @thickenterprises account had been banned on Instagram. The night before, the account had no posting or feature restrictions. 

Instagram apparently stated that a poster for a show on Aug. 14, nearly two weeks earlier, was “soliciting sex and posting nudity.” But no one was nude; Chantal made sure no posts violated Meta’s community guidelines, and the decision to change the business’s name from Thick Strip to Thick Enterprises was partly due to efforts to adhere to them. (Chantal said it had been called Thick Strip since 2018, and it was never an issue until 2026.)

The accounts of several Thick Enterprises dancers were also removed, Chantal told Mashable. Like Hughes, she believes this is due to discriminatory AI. 

“It’s our belief that the AI moderation system is reading these larger bodies as being nude because we have more skin,” she said. “This algorithmic bias is baked into this coding, and we believe it because our peers who are smaller in this industry don’t seem to be facing this disproportional enforcement of these community guidelines.”

Chantal also said that everything she posts will be labeled “body positive” — even if that’s not what the content is about. “I’ll post a photo of me at the beach, or a photo of me in a pretty outfit, and I’ll say I’m a business owner, or I went to a concert, or summer joy, and every single post will mention body positivity.”

She believes Meta’s AI content moderation oscillates between reading bigger bodies as “body positivity” or vulgarity. 

“I have felt surveilled,” she said. “It has felt very 1984.”

The impact of Meta’s content moderation

On Oct. 1, Meta’s Oversight Board (an independent body that reviews the company’s content enforcement decisions) announced that it’s conducting new research to provide guidelines on how to use AI content moderation “in a way that respects free expression, reduces harm and adheres to recognized human rights standards.”

While the Oversight Board initially welcomed AI use in content moderation in March, it noted the well-known risks associated with LLMs, such as inherent biases and hallucinations, as well as their struggle to handle nuances of communication, such as sarcasm, humor, and coded language. 

These businesses are facing the human impact of these pitfalls.

Before Cantiq’s account was restored, Hughes said this “might be the final nail in our coffin,” given the economy and the fact that lingerie isn’t recession-proof. 

“One of the main ways we’ve been able to survive this storm that a lot of people are going through is because of our popularity on Instagram.” She had to think of her five employees and their livelihoods, too.

Lucido of Precinct said that as the process becomes automated, getting an actual person to look at a problem feels nearly impossible. When accounts are removed — without explanation or human support — it results in missed promotions, disrupted communication, and potentially lost business. 

“An apology after the fact doesn’t undo that,” he said. “We need reliable human support, clear explanations, and accountability when these systems repeatedly fail our community.”

Meanwhile, big brands like Kardashian-owned Skims seem to be allowed to post whatever they want. In 2025, Mashable reported that Skims was able to post about pubic hair underwear while smaller creators get banned for showing less sexual content.

“Not only is it discriminatory towards the plus-size community and the queer community, but it’s also just discriminatory to small businesses in general,” Hughes said, “and we’re the ones that need them the most.”

Chantal said the deletions have made her feel like she’s doing something wrong by existing as an adult and empowering others, but she knows in her heart of hearts it’s not illegal nor wrong.

“It’s been a battle inside of me…feeling this pressure to bow to our digital overlords and the way that they want to run the internet. Do I do that for the sake of still existing on this platform, or do I stay authentic to how we are?” she asked. 

But seeing other businesses’ and people’s accounts removed made her realize it’s not her fault. “We’re all just victims,” she said.