Instagram glitch (pexels photo)
Since 2012, Thea-mei Bauman, an artist and technology expert from Brisbane, Australia, has been sharing her work on Instagram. She never encountered problems with the photo-based social network – until on November 2, when she tried to log in, she discovered that it had been blocked, due to what the company defined as “impersonating someone else.”
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Bauman tried to do what any user who knows his account has been unjustly blocked does: she asked to verify her identity and confirm that she owns the account. But the company did not bother to repeat it for a whole month.
This is the moment to reveal that this scenario, roughly, was predicted by one of her followers a few days before it happened. The reason: Bauman’s Instagram account name is @metaverse – the name of the virtual world that Facebook is working on, just days before the block, on October 28, it even changed its name to its abbreviation, meta. During the days between the name change and the purchase, Bauman received several messages on the subject, including “You are a millionaire now” and “Facebook is not going to buy (the account), they are going to take it.” And that’s probably what happened a few days later.
“This account is a decade of my life and my work,” Bauman told the New York Times, adding that the name of the account is an abbreviation of the name of the company she founded nearly a decade ago, Metaverse Makeovers. The company, based in China, has developed an app that when you look at nails designed by Bauman’s designs, the phone screen revives them in a variety of interactive animations in augmented reality (ie dressing a virtual video layer on the live image from the device’s camera).
“I did not want my contribution to Towers to be erased from the internet,” she said, adding an interesting accusation: “It happens to women in technology, to ‘colorful’ women in technology, all the time.”
Meanwhile, the story seems to have come to a happy end thanks to media exposure: a month after the blockade, the newspaper turned to the social network for a response to the article – and a company spokesman replied that “the account was incorrectly removed for impersonation” and returned to Bauman. “We are sorry that this mistake happened,” he added. Two days later she got her bill back.
Now, Bauman plans to use the experience as part of a project that began last year, and whose theme is death in the virtual world. She added that she has no confidence in the meta and similar societies: “I feel fears that the Matavers space will be corrupted by the kind of technological-male brotherhood that I feel lacks vision and integrity.”
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