Threads Bots Locked Me Out
On the morning of 13 October 2026 I picked up my phone and like many other mornings, logged in to Threads to catch up with what had been said overnight.
While I was browsing, I saw a message that said I needed to verify my identity. I didn’t screenshot it, but basically I was sent a WhatsApp 2FA challenge, and then it asked me to upload a recent selfie. I chose one from a few days ago rather than show Meta my morning face.
So I continued scrolling for a bit and then the Threads app got crankier, and then logged me out while I was still in the app.
I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong and I assumed I’d had been the victim of a hacking attack. I can’t recall exactly the order things happened but of course these days you end up talking to Meta’s chatbot, so I asked it what was going on.
It told me to check my emails and I saw this:
Community Standards violation? I never use profanities, curse or insult people. I never tell them to take their own lives, use racial slurs, SHOUTY CAPS or anything like that. I have just been chatting and rationally arguing about things for the last two years. The whole time, I have been on the receiving end of all of the above and always replied calmly. I hardly ever block anyone for any of this behavior, but I have tried to make Threads a better place by reporting the posts that I feel have crossed the line. And some of those offenders’ individual posts have been taken down. I’ve taken lots of screenshots of my conversations with people guilty of abusive posts taken just before they blocked me, or sometimes just after while their posts were still in my local cache.
I’d just reached 1300 followers too, so this really stings.
None of my content has even been flagged since 2025, and that was on Facebook or Instagram not Threads itself. and because Meta chooses not to show you the content of the flagged post I can’t even discuss with you what triggered those particular takedowns.
So when you are going back and forth with Meta.ai, you get sent a lot of links to the Instagram and Facebook help pages. Many of these are dead, so you have to report that back to the AI which then has another try. Very annoying that they don’t run an AI that keeps up to date with the latest changes. That’s one of the points of using these things, isn’t it?
In just over an hour, I got another email telling me the decision was final. Their bots had chatted amongst themselves and gave the execution order. No fair trial, and not even an AI generated summary to tell me how it had come to this conclusion.
Most of the help pages tell you to login to Threads and follow the onscreen prompts to have the decision reviewed. But for me there was no button or link! All you get told is that their bots have made a final decision. Who’s in charge here?
The bot doesn’t understand that there is no appeal button. It’s just “We deactivated your account. Suck it.”
Meanwhile you get lots of vague “Something went wrong” which is Meta’s way of trying not to be like Microsoft and showing you the underbelly of their system, more like Apple, saying “you. don’t want to know the nerdy details”.
Go home, Meta, you’re drunk. I tried the Business.facebook.com pages but found no joy there either. I have had an issue resolved by a human agent once before, and I was pleasantly surprised. My band had no such luck back when someone ordered our page taken down due to a duplicate page name, forcing us to create a new page and start from scratch.
Eventually I started a new chat with the Meta.ai that’s within Facebook and somehow this one seems cleverer than the others. It had me make a ticket in Instagram’s help system and said I should wait a couple of days for it to be seen in the queue.
I need to get this reviewed by a human agent, or the Oversight Board which I hope isn’t just another AI, because this is intolerable. How do they expect me to be interested in spending money advertising with them to promote my business when I have to deal with this crap?