Dear Meta,
We need to talk.
I know relationships are complicated. You have billions of users, global moderation systems and enough computing power to recognize my face in a photograph taken in 2014. I have one Instagram account and occasionally forget my password. There was always going to be a power imbalance.
But Albania appears to have discovered something about our relationship that I do not remember seeing in the terms and conditions.
Someone seems to have found the Delete Albania button.
Not literally, obviously. That would be ridiculous. I assume internally it has a more elegant name, something like Integrity Enforcement Workflow 7B.
First, thank you for giving everyone a voice
This was the original promise of social media. Anyone could publish. You no longer needed a television station, a printing press, a wealthy owner, a broadcast licence or a newspaper distribution network. You needed a phone, an internet connection and enough emotional resilience to watch strangers argue underneath a photograph of a sandwich.
For journalists, activists, independent publishers and ordinary people, platforms like Instagram and Facebook changed the economics of communication. The cost of reaching an audience collapsed. The gatekeepers weakened. Publishing became available to almost anyone.
It was genuinely revolutionary.
Then somebody appears to have noticed the other side of the design.
If everyone can become a publisher, perhaps everyone can also become a junior member of the censorship department.
All you need is the report button.
Albania has been having an interesting week
In late August and early September, dozens of Instagram accounts connected to people documenting events and public protests in Albania were reportedly restricted, had content removed or were disabled. The affected accounts included activists, civic platforms, journalists and other highly visible voices.
According to Repro Uncensored, many of the cases it documented appeared to involve copyright infringement reports. The organization said the pattern appeared consistent with coordinated targeting.
That word matters: appeared.
We do not currently know publicly who submitted all the complaints, whether they were connected or what motivated them. This is not a detective story where I reveal the villain three sections from now. I do not have one, and pretending otherwise would make the argument weaker, not stronger.
Then, on September 5, the story became considerably harder for me to observe from a comfortable intellectual distance.
Euronews Albania reported that its own Instagram account had become inaccessible. According to the newsroom, there had been no prior notice or warning. The page simply returned “User not found.”
I am emotionally involved with this case, so I will say that plainly rather than perform some artificial neutrality. Euronews Albania is not an anonymous case study to me. Seeing an established newsroom suddenly lose access to its audience changes the temperature of the argument.
It also produced a piece of timing so absurd that, if this were fiction, an editor would probably ask us to make it less obvious.
The night before the account disappeared, Euronews Albania had broadcast a discussion specifically about the wave of Albanian Instagram shutdowns and the need for Meta to explain what was happening. Less than 24 hours later, Euronews Albania's own Instagram page was inaccessible.
There is no evidence establishing a connection between those two events. Euronews itself makes that clear, and so should we.
But you must admit, Meta, the comedic timing is extraordinary.
A newsroom asks, “Why are Albanian Instagram accounts disappearing?”
Instagram responds:
User not found.
Subtle.
Meta has acknowledged that some Albanian accounts caught up in the broader wave were removed by mistake, according to Euronews Albania's reporting, and several profiles have since been restored.
Which is reassuring.
In roughly the same way that a restaurant returning your wallet after accidentally throwing it into the Adriatic is reassuring.
Thank you.
I suppose.
The more interesting question, however, is not simply why individual accounts disappeared. It is why a system capable of distributing information to hundreds of thousands of people can apparently interrupt that distribution first and explain itself later.
And this, Meta, is why I'm writing
I spend much of my working life thinking about communication systems. Not just about what people say, but who gets heard, who distributes the message, what controls visibility and what happens between pressing “publish” and another human being actually seeing something.
For years, people working in communication obsessed over content: the message, the headline, the campaign, the story. Increasingly, though, the most powerful editor in the room is not an editor at all.
It is infrastructure.
A ranking algorithm decides what gets noticed. A recommendation system decides what travels. A moderation system decides what remains. And somewhere inside this extraordinary machinery sits a small button marked Report.
Such an innocent word. Very civic. Almost Scandinavian.
You see something bad, you report it. The platform investigates. Justice occurs.
Except there is an awkward design problem: a reporting system works best when the person filing the complaint is primarily interested in enforcing the rules.
The internet has met people.
This assumption may require further testing.
I know you already know this
Here is the awkward part of the love letter where I remind you of something you once told us yourself.
In a 2022 Adversarial Threat Report, Meta documented an operation in Bolivia involving what the company described as mass reporting, or coordinated abusive reporting. Fake accounts were used to submit large numbers of false reports against targets that included news organizations and opposition figures, with the intention of getting them removed and silenced.
Meta found the network. Meta removed it.
So this is not a speculative weakness discovered by a suspicious Albanian with Wi-Fi.
Meta has already documented that its own reporting architecture can be weaponized in an attempt to silence legitimate voices.
That creates a slightly uncomfortable design question. Once you know someone has discovered that the fire alarm can also be used to evacuate people they dislike, you probably should not design the next building around the assumption that nobody will press it maliciously.
Unfortunately, other people have been experimenting too
In May 2026, Reporters Without Borders documented hundreds of posts belonging to independent media in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan being removed from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube following allegedly fraudulent trademark and copyright complaints. Some complaints reportedly used the identities of real companies and journalists without their involvement.
One Instagram account was suspended following copyright complaints submitted within less than a minute.
A minute.
There are cappuccinos that take longer to censor.
RSF concluded that platform moderation systems were being exploited as tools to suppress independent media. Then, only days before the controversy in Albania, independent Azerbaijani outlets operating in exile reported that Instagram pages belonging to media organizations had been blocked following copyright complaints. Several organizations described what was happening as a coordinated attack.
Different countries. Different contexts. No evidence that the incidents are connected.
But structurally, they rhyme.
A complaint is filed. The platform acts. The publisher disappears. The publisher appeals. Eventually, perhaps, a human enters the story.
It is an extraordinary reversal of one of the principles we normally associate with justice.
In the physical world:
evidence → judgment → punishment
On the internet, it can sometimes feel closer to:
complaint → punishment → customer support ticket
Very disruptive.
Silicon Valley would be proud.
Copyright has apparently developed ambitions
Copyright law was created to protect creative work: writers, photographers, artists, musicians and other people who make things. A noble idea.
It would therefore be a particularly impressive achievement if copyright reporting systems became useful for preventing people from publishing work they themselves created.
That is not copyright protection.
That is copyright improv.
The danger is not simply that one photograph disappears. Social platforms use accumulated enforcement. One complaint can become a strike. Another can become a restriction. Restrictions can affect distribution. Repeated enforcement can threaten the account itself.
The interesting unit of censorship, therefore, is no longer necessarily the post.
It is the account.
Remove one article from a newspaper and the newspaper publishes another tomorrow. Disable the printing press and we have a different problem.
For many independent creators, journalists and civic organizations, an Instagram account effectively is the printing press.
And this is why the Euronews Albania case matters to me beyond the obvious personal reaction. A newsroom losing its social distribution is not equivalent to somebody temporarily losing access to holiday photographs. For a modern media organization, these platforms are part of the distribution infrastructure.
You can continue producing journalism while your Instagram account is inaccessible.
What you cannot do is reach the audience that expected to find it there.
The newsroom still exists.
The printing press is running.
Someone has simply locked the delivery vans in the garage.
But perhaps “censorship” is too dramatic a word
Fair point, Meta. Let us be reasonable.
There is no evidence that Meta woke up one morning and decided Albania had been enjoying excessive quantities of freedom of expression. Large platforms process enormous volumes of content and complaints. Mistakes happen. Automated moderation is necessary at this scale. Copyright infringement is real. Harassment is real. Impersonation is real. Coordinated manipulation is real.
Platforms genuinely need reporting mechanisms. Remove the report button entirely and the internet does not suddenly become Athens in the age of philosophy. It becomes considerably worse.
The issue is not that moderation exists. The issue is how cheaply moderation can potentially be triggered against legitimate speech, and how expensive the correction process becomes for the person targeted.
That asymmetry matters.
Submitting a report takes seconds. Recovering an account can take days. The person submitting the complaint pays almost nothing. The person on the receiving end may lose distribution, audience, momentum, credibility and access to years of accumulated work.
For a newsroom, there is another cost: timing.
News is perishable.
You cannot restore Tuesday's distribution on Friday.
You cannot give a breaking story its audience back three days later.
You cannot tell a newsroom, “Good news, your microphone works again,” after the event everyone was trying to hear about has ended.
One side presses a button.
The other begins a correspondence with a machine.
Which brings us to trust
Dear Meta, this is where the relationship gets serious.
Platforms like yours no longer simply host communication. You govern its visibility. That makes moderation less like cleaning up a comment section and more like administering infrastructure.
Not legally.
Functionally.
People organize there. Businesses depend on it. Journalists publish there. Public institutions communicate there. Movements form there. Reputations are built there. Entire professions now contain the sentence: “My account has 200,000 followers.”
That audience may have taken a decade to build. Yet its continued existence can sometimes feel dependent on whether an automated system believes an email address claiming ownership over a photograph.
We have achieved technological wonders. Satellites. Generative AI. Self-driving cars. Instant translation between languages.
And apparently the question, “Is this copyright complaint obviously fake?”, remains one of civilization's final unsolved mysteries.
Perhaps we need a Department of Digital Paperwork
I have a proposal.
If moderation must occasionally resemble bureaucracy, we should at least commit to the aesthetic. Create a proper ministry.
META MINISTRY OF DIGITAL TRUTH
Inside it, we could have the Department of Copyright Complaints, responsible for complaints about things the complainant may or may not own. Next door, the Department of Community Standards, maintaining several thousand pages of rules nobody has completely read.
Down the corridor would sit the Department of Appeals, where users submit evidence proving that they are themselves. Beyond that, naturally, the Department of Appealing the Appeal, which informs you that you have exceeded the maximum number of attempts to prove that you are yourself.
Finally, on the top floor, we would find the Department of Account Restoration.
Congratulations. Your account has been restored.
Beside it would be the Department of Explaining Why It Was Removed.
Closed indefinitely.
Now we are being honest.
Albania isn't actually the biggest story here
That may sound strange in an article with Albania in the headline, but Albania is the case study. The bigger story is structural.
Social media democratized publishing, but moderation centralized the ability to revoke publishing.
That creates an unusual form of power. You do not necessarily need to convince the public that someone's speech is wrong. You may only need to convince the platform that their account is problematic.
And if the system processes punishment faster than it processes truth, the temporary outcome can become indistinguishable from censorship.
Temporary censorship still matters. A protest is happening now. A news event is happening now. A reputation crisis is happening now. Restoring the microphone on Tuesday does not completely solve the problem if the speech needed to happen on Saturday.
This is especially obvious when the affected account belongs to a newsroom.
Journalism has always depended on timing. The value of a newspaper delivered three days late was never quite the same as the newspaper delivered that morning. Digital media did not abolish that principle. It accelerated it.
Timing is part of freedom of expression too.
So, Meta, consider this a relationship intervention
I do not want you to stop moderating.
I want moderation worthy of the power you already possess.
If dozens of accounts in the same country suddenly receive similar complaints in a compressed period, that should itself become a signal. If one complainant repeatedly targets journalists or civic accounts, that should become a signal. If copyright claims arrive at machine-gun speed, that should become a signal.
And if an account belongs to an established newsroom or is engaged in clear public-interest reporting, irreversible enforcement should probably involve more human scrutiny, not less.
When mistakes happen, transparency cannot end with: “Oops. We've restored it.”
Platforms expect users to explain themselves constantly. Verify your identity. Explain your appeal. Submit documentation. Prove ownership. Confirm your telephone number. Tell us why you disagree with this decision.
Fair enough.
Perhaps occasionally the platform could return the favour.
Explain what happened. Explain whether coordinated abuse was detected. Explain what safeguards failed. Explain what changed afterward.
Because this week, I watched a newsroom ask Meta for an explanation about why Albanian accounts were disappearing.
Then I watched that newsroom's own Instagram account disappear.
I do not know why.
That is precisely the problem.
Accountability should also have a user interface.
Anyway, I still love you
Of course I do.
Everyone does.
That is partly the problem.
We complain about Instagram on Instagram. We criticize Facebook on Facebook. We announce that social media has too much power through social media posts carefully optimized for the social media algorithm.
The relationship has become magnificently codependent.
You gave us the world's most powerful publishing infrastructure. Then you gave everyone a report button. And somewhere between those two excellent ideas sits a problem that can no longer be dismissed as a minor moderation glitch.
Because once publishing becomes infrastructure, moderation becomes governance.
And when governance can be triggered by anonymous complaints, manipulated claims or coordinated reporting, the design of the complaint system becomes a question of free expression.
So thank you, Meta.
For connecting the world, democratizing publishing and occasionally restoring accounts you should not have removed.
And most of all, for reminding us that the most efficient censorship system of the digital age may not require a Ministry of Information, a printing ban or somebody kicking down the newsroom door.
Sometimes it may only require Wi-Fi.
And a button marked Report.
With love,
Gledis