Meta Defends Blocking No Kings’ Instagram in the Middle of Event

Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.

During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hours-long suspension: there was a high volume of activity on the page.

“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote on X Sunday.

“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.”

“An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he continued. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”

The No Kings Coalition claimed that Meta’s explanation still didn’t make sense.

“In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands. Meta’s ‘high frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up,” the group wrote on Bluesky Sunday.

“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 group wrote in a separate post.

onnecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded to Stone’s statement, calling on X for an investigation into the No Kings account’s sudden suspension. “Let’s assume this is true. It’s still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics,” he wrote.

“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he added.

By cozying up to the Trump administration, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts. Now, it appears that the company may be doubling down on its allegiances by outright silencing the president’s critics.

The Supreme Court just signed off on President Trump’s firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board despite laws against at-will dismissals, further cementing his power over independent agencies.

On Monday, the high court decided not to review a ruling from the lower U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia allowing the firing of Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump decided to axe just after his inauguration last year. Wilcox was the first Black woman member of the NLRB, and had been appointed to a second five-year term on the board by President Biden in 2023.

The Supreme Court’s decision is in line with its earlier ruling in June allowing Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. The D.C. circuit decision in Wilcox’s case came before the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter’s case.

The NLRB and the FTC, along with other federal regulatory bodies, are supposed to be independent from the president’s control, with bipartisan boards. But in his second term as president, Trump has ignored rules protecting agency members from being fired without cause, pushing out members simply because they were appointed by Democrats.

While the Supreme Court has enabled Trump in the cases of Slaughter and now Wilcox, it has drawn the line with Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, and prevented the president from firing her. That hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to smear Cook with a cooked-up investigation over alleged mortgage fraud. Cook has not been charged with any crimes, but Trump isn’t interested in sniffing out wrongdoing: He wants to assert total control over regulatory agencies.

Longtime CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour will be leaving the network next June.

“After many months of thought and a few sleepless nights, I have decided to separate from CNN, my partner of 43 fantastic years!” Amanpour said in a statement Monday. “[I look] forward to interesting new projects down the line, and will always be rooting for CNN and maintaining its history of independent journalism. Remember: always be truthful, not neutral.”

Amanpour’s resignation announcement comes just two weeks after pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison bought the media outlet in Paramount’s massive acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This includes ownership of HBO and HBO Max, Warner Bros. movie and TV studios, DC, CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter, staunch Zionist, and billionaire founder of Oracle. The father-son duo have been vocal about their desire to regulate media narratives via TikTok, CBS, and now, CNN.

Amanpour’s announcement did not mention Ellison.

“Christiane has thought carefully about this decision, and she and I have been discussing it for some months,” CNN head Mark Thompson wrote in a statement. “Like so many CNNers who will hear the news today, I’m very sorry to see her go, but I’ve come to accept that this is the right time for her, both personally and professionally.”

This story has been updated.

Americans who survived tornados, floods, and wildfires are still waiting on $10 billion in aid from the Trump administration over a year later.

A Guardian analysis finds that FEMA has not doled out long-term recovery funds to survivors of the 2025 tornado in St Louis, the central Texas floods, or the wildfires in Los Angeles. These natural disasters crippled infrastructure, destroyed homes, and displaced thousands.

“To find out that your own country can’t even do what it has historically done for other survivors of disasters, that’s very disheartening, and it’s also what kind of galvanized me to get involved,” Los Angeles resident Sylvie Andrews, who lost her Altadena home in the wildfires, told The Guardian. “There are people in Congress who are resistant to the idea of pre-funding anything when they’re not sure there’s going to be a disaster, and the reality is there will be more disasters every year because of climate change.… I guarantee there will be communities that need it.”

“The insurance didn’t cover much of anything. And the Fema just kind of backed you up for a little while, but didn’t get you back on track,” said Demetrice Davis, who lost his home in a St. Louis tornado. “The government agencies are not really doing what they’re supposed to do. “It’s just a matter of asking, as a taxpaying citizen, what are we paying for? ... As a taxpaying citizen, we are putting in the pot. We are supposed to get some type of return. But it seems like that’s not happening. And there seems to be a lot of excuses and passing the buck because most of the lawmakers we talked to blamed it on other lawmakers.”

Both Davis and Andrews traveled to Washington, D.C., last month with Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association to lobby lawmakers to reactivate the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, or CDBG-DR, which is supposed to allocate funds to rebuilding homes and infrastructure after natural disasters.

“Let’s be clear: this is funding FEMA had already approved and that we have been demanding the agency release for weeks,” California Democratic Representative Judy Chu said last month. “And while today is progress, President Trump still has not delivered the long-term federal disaster recovery funding Los Angeles communities need to rebuild.”

This is not the first instance in which Americans caught in natural disasters have been hung out to dry by the Trump administration. Last year, President Trump denied disaster aid requests from multiple blue states while awarding it to red ones. He did it once again over the summer, putting millions of Americans at risk in the process.

The Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, is warning that the federal government is threatening the integrity of American elections.

“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things,” Henderson told CBS News. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”

Henderson pointed to the Justice Department’s demand for every state to hand over their full voter rolls, including information that is legally required to remain confidential.

“They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” Henderson, whose job includes overseeing Utah’s elections, said to CBS. Out of concerns for the federal government’s motive, she refused to provide the data alongside officials in 29 other states.

Last month, the DOJ notified Henderson in writing that she is under investigation.

“I have to tell myself it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I’m doing what’s right,” Henderson said. “I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guard rails, holding the line. Someone has to.”

Federal agents acting on orders from the Trump administration have seized ballots and voting machines this year, and President Trump himself has continuously pushed election conspiracies. Trump has signed executive orders requiring proof of citizenship to vote and restricting mail-in ballots, and last week, his Department of Justice sued California, claiming, without proof, that the state was sending ballots to 20,000 noncitizens.

California’s top elections official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, said that the Trump administration didn’t say where the “20,000” number came from or how they verified those individuals’ citizenship status.

“The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said in a statement.