Woman Loses @metaverse Instagram Handle After Company Rebrands Itself

As you might know by now, Facebook rebranded itself to Meta as part of the company’s plan to eventually build its own metaverse. Now, the term metaverse has been around for a while and some people have been using it for a while now, like Thea-Mai Baumann who had been using the @metaverse handle for the past decade or so.

However, it seems that following Facebook’s announcement that they would now be called Meta, Instagram (which is also owned by Meta) blocked her account. According to a message that she saw when she opened the app, “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.”

What’s interesting about this is that following Facebook’s announcement, Baumann started to receive messages from people offering to buy the handle off her, with one person even warning that Facebook could potentially just end up taking the name from her. Whether or not Meta/Instagram had anything to do with her account being blocked is unclear.

However, following an interview with the New York Times, Stephanie Otway, a Meta company spokesperson told ArsTechnica that Baumann’s account had been reinstated. “This account was incorrectly removed for impersonation, and we’ve now restored it. We’re sorry that this happened.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Instagram, meta