LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — A Las Vegas business owner says her dream of starting her own business was delayed by a wrongfully disabled social media account.
After a lay off followed by an unsuccessful job search, Leslye Spindler says she decided to launch her own company called “Alennya.”
“As a family, they supported me, and we decided to go for it,” Spindler says.
She said they invested all they had into the company. She even traveled to South America to source her own products. Gold plated jewelry, leather bags, ponchos: all hand-picked by Spindler, who’s originally from Ecuador herself.
“These are all handmade by indigenous families in the Andes mountains in Ecuador,” Spindler said, while showing FOX5 her products.
Mid-July, Spindler says an email from Instagram put her dream on pause. She says her 16-year-old daughter’s Instagram account was suspended for not following “Community Standards on child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.”
She says immediately, every account connected to her daughter’s was disabled, too, including her business account.
“We have not been able to to make any sales to this point because there’s no way to promote it,” Spindler says. “We just felt trapped, and not just for the business, but having such an accusation on a family member, it was just hurtful.”
She says they appealed the suspension, and waited.
Spindler isn’t the only Las Vegas small business owner FOX5 spoke to whose account was disabled.
FOX5 emailed Meta several usernames, including Spindler’s business account and her daughter’s account. A spokesperson replied, saying some of the accounts FOX5 sent were correctly removed for breaking their rules, but they also restored accounts that were removed in error.
Spindler says within hours of FOX5’S email, she and her daughter regained access to their accounts.
“We were celebrating. We were so excited,” she says.
Newly back into her account, Spindler says she’s planning how to promote Alennya online. But, she’s keeping other business owners in mind who still have not regained access.
An online petition, claiming Meta’s Artificial Intelligence Moderation System is disabling thousands of accounts without cause, has garnered more than 34,000 signatures.
A Meta Spokesperson provided the following statement:
According to their website, Meta uses a combination of people and technology to find and remove accounts that break their rules. When deciding which content needs to be reviewed by humans, they consider three main factors: severity, virality, and likelihood of violating.
You can find more information about how they prioritize content for human review here.
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