Artist Named ‘Metaverse’ On Instagram Had Handle Seized After Facebook Rebrand
Photo 231989917 © Irina Ivanova | Dreamstime.com
In 2012, Australian artist and technologist Thea-Mai Baumann started a company called Metaverse Makeovers and gave it the handle of @metaverse on Instagram.
Baumann started dabbling with augmented reality even before the rise of Snapchat and Instagram filters, as well as Pokémon Go, according to a profile by the New York Times. She’d use it to project fingernail art in holograms shown on phone screens. AR’s potential in the realms of fashion and beauty was not lost on her, but when funding for the business ran out in 2017, she went back to doing art and chronicled her life on the account.
Then, as rumors swirled that Facebook was about to announce its foray into the metaverse and rebrand as Meta, Baumann—who had under 1,000 followers on Instagram at the time—received a barrage of messages from users commending her foresight. One premonition even claimed that “[Facebook] isn’t going to buy [the handle], they’re gonna take it.”
After the Facebook overhaul, Baumann woke up to discover that her Instagram account had been disabled for “pretending to be someone else.”
“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,” she declared in a statement published by the Times. Baumann, who is part Vietnamese, added that situations like this “[happen] to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time.”
Instagram did not respond to her appeals, and her attempt to get an intellectual property lawyer involved turned futile as she could only afford as much as a review of Instagram’s guidelines.
The social network finally stirred after the Times reached out to Meta for clarification on December 2. A spokesperson then acknowledged that the @Metaverse account was “incorrectly removed for impersonation” and apologized for the oversight on Instagram’s behalf. The representative did not disclose how the account ended up being flagged or why Baumann was being accused of impersonating someone else.
The artist had her account reinstated two days later, and now plans to channel this experience into art as part of an existing P∞st_Lyfe project she launched last year. Per the Times, she’s also looking at avenues to help the metaverse become the inclusive destination it is promised to be.
[via The New York Times, cover photo 231989917 © Irina Ivanova | Dreamstime.com]
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