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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Florida U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon, a Democrat, said that Meta "suddenly took down" an Instagram account her campaign had created to connect with Latino voters while "actively posting" information on a rally in Osceola County.
"We are currently hosting a get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community, and our #LatinosConAngie Instagram page was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from the event," the Florida state representative wrote on her X account Tuesday night, addressing Meta.
"This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community. With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters," she added. Nixon called on Meta to "immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal." She is running against Ashley Moody, a Republican who was appointed as Marco Rubio’s temporary replacement after he took on the role of secretary of state.
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The Democratic candidate also shared a screenshot of a message from Instagram informing her that the page "Latinos Con Angie" had been suspended. "This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity." The message also informs Nixon that she has until April 25, 2027, to appeal Meta’s suspension before her account is disabled.
As of Wednesday early morning, the Instagram page was back online. Newsweek contacted Nixon’s campaign and Meta for comment by email on Wednesday morning, outside of standard working hours, and awaits responses.
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Nixon, who is currently trailing Moody by a few percentage points in polls released this month, held her "Boricuas for Angie" rally at Osceola Heritage Park in Kissimmee, Florida, on Tuesday. The Democratic socialist spoke alongside fellow Democrats New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, New York Representative Nydia Velázquez and Florida Representative Maxwell Frost.
No Kings Incident Looms Over Nixon Account’s Suspension
In a post shared on Instagram, the 50501 Movement, a progressive grassroots political movement founded in January 2025 to organize the 50501 protests against the second Trump administration, wrote that the "Latinos Con Angie" account was "shut down for well over an hour."
The group also reported that Meta shut down the Instagram account @nokingscoalition in the middle of "No Kings Day" on October 17; this suggests that Meta’s actions were not a mistake.
"The No Kings Coalition sent two letters to Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Meta has failed to substantively address the coalition’s demands for public answers regarding the wrongful suspension of its Instagram account during the No Kings: Vote Early national day of action," the movement wrote.
The No Kings Instagram account, used by protests’ organizers and attendees, was offline for more than an hour. Meta has since apologized for suspending the account. It said that it had done so because of a sharp increase in activity on October 17, the day of the protests, that looked like automated bot traffic rather than genuine human exchanges.
"These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline," Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote in a post on X.
"We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error."
The No Kings movement was not satisfied with Meta’s explanation, saying it did not "add up."
"Beyond shutting down our Instagram, we’ve received reports that NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted, or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms," the No Kings Coalition wrote on Bluesky.
Newsweek contacted the No Kings Coalition for comment by email on Wednesday and is waiting for a reply.
Meta Under Increased Scrutiny
Ahead of the November midterms, social media has been awash with AI-driven misinformation and other untrustworthy information, raising concerns from experts. The role of social media in providing and shaping information about political elections around the world has grown in recent years, as has scrutiny over Meta’s influence on this process.
The latest Sprout Social’s Q3 2026 Pulse Survey found that social media are the main source of midterms news for American millennials and Gen Zers, while TV was the top source for all voters. But the influence of social media is felt among all age groups: 55 percent of Americans said a social media post had informed or changed their opinion on who to vote for. Among Gen Zers, that number rose to 79 percent, with 48 percent saying a social post had changed their opinion outright.
Pew Research published the results of a new poll last week, conducted among 3,500 U.S. adults, showing that 58 percent of Americans now consider social media to be a key way to get news and information; this is up from 43 percent in 2022. Once again, the youngest adults proved more reliant on social media for election information than older ones. Seventy-six percent among those aged 18 to 29 said they were an important way to keep up with the news, against 41 percent of those aged 65 and older.
The Oversight Board, an independent body that reviews content moderation decisions made by Meta on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, released a statement earlier this month in light of Meta’s handling of the "No Kings" Instagram account. The board expressed concern over "recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts."
The co-chairs wrote: "From the removal of political activist accounts during protests in the U.S. ahead of the midterm elections to technical restrictions that hit the accounts of a presidential candidate in Brazil leading to allegations of electoral interference, it’s clear that Meta must do more to ensure that its enforcement practices during elections are transparent and consistent and that political speech is protected rather than stifled.
"We have repeatedly warned that during elections and periods of heightened political tension, Meta’s content moderation failures often manifest themselves in two ways: overenforcement that suppresses political speech and underenforcement that undermines electoral integrity."
The board said that the suspension of the "No Kings" account on October 17 "should have been caught by Meta’s mistake-prevention systems."
Newsweek contacted the Oversight Board for comment by email on Wednesday and is awaiting a response.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Rebecca Flood and James Debens
Register for our November 10 discussion, 'Newsweek Webinar: How the Politics of AI Could Shape Midterms,' which will examine how AI policy played in key races, data centers, lobbying and the political lines that emerged.
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