An artist says her @metaverse Instagram account was disabled after Facebook rebranded to Meta — and that she only got it back after asking the company what happened

• An Instagram user with the @metaverse handle says her account was disabled after Facebook rebranded.
• The platform said her account was taken down because she was impersonating someone.

An artist told The New York Times that Instagram disabled her @metaverse account after its parent company Facebook rebranded to Meta.

Australia-based Thea-Mai Baumann told The Times that she's had an Instagram account since 2012 with the handle @metaverse. She posted about her AR company, Metaverse Makeovers, on her account. The app allowed users to try on holographic nail designs.

But on Nov. 2, five days after Facebook announced its name change, Baumann told the outlet that Instagram had disabled it.

"Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else," read a message in her app. She tried to get answers from Instagram, including who she was accused of impersonating, to no avail.

It wasn't until a month later that The New York Times reached out to Meta inquiring what had happened.

An Instagram spokesperson told the paper that the account was "incorrectly removed for impersonation."

"We're sorry this error occurred," they said, per The Times, without elaborating on why Baumann's profile was disabled for impersonation. The account was reactivated two days later.

"This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet," Baumann told The Times.

"That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time," said Baumann, who has Vietnamese heritage.

A Meta spokesperson reiterated the company's statement to Insider, saying it is "sorry that this happened."

The company changed its name to reflect its goal of expanding into the metaverse, a futuristic virtual landscape where people can live, play, and work with digital avatars.

"Now, we have a new north star," Zuckerberg said when he announced the rebrand in late October. "From now on, we are going to be Metaverse first, not Facebook first."

This isn't the first kerfuffle involving Meta's name change and companies operating with a similar brand.

The company had to take @wearemeta on Instagram since a Denver-based motorbike magazine already held the @meta handle.

And in early November, Arizona-based startup electronics Meta PC founder Zach Schutt told Insider the company filed for the "Meta" trademark in August. The firm had been using its brand since November 2020.

Meta filed to trademark the name on Oct. 28, according to its filing with the Patents and Trademark Office. But the nonprofit Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gained ownership of the "META" trademark in 2018, according to a separate filing.