After parent corporation Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta, an Instagram user with the handle @metaverse was removed from her account, which featured a decade of her life and work, last month.
On October 28, Facebook, which owns Instagram, preserved the name Facebook for its social media platform but changed its overarching corporate name to Meta, marking a move to represent the virtual world that the tech giant sees as the internet’s future.
Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, had her account deactivated on November 2nd, according to the New York Times.
“Your account has been disabled for trying to be someone else,” read the notification on her screen.
Over the next few weeks, Baumann said she tried to authenticate her identity with Instagram but received no response.
“This is a ten-year summary of my life and work.” Baumann told the site, “I didn’t want my contribution to the metaverse to be erased from the internet.”
“That occurs all the time to women in tech, to women of color in tech,” the artist, who is Vietnamese, added.
Baumann established her Instagram account in 2012 to capture her life as a Brisbane arts student and the augmented reality company she later founded, Metaverse Makeovers.
