ORLANDO, Fla. – Two Orlando LGBTQIA+ nightclub owners say Instagram disabled their business accounts after flagging them for “human exploitation,” leaving them without a key way to promote events and reach customers.
Brandon Llewellyn, co-owner of Savoy, said the nightclub received a message from Meta, Instagram’s parent company, two days after Orlando Pride.
The message said two of Savoy’s Instagram accounts had been disabled.
“They say it’s a human exploitation, basically accusing us of human trafficking, which obviously is not happening here,” Llewellyn said.
According to Llewellyn, Savoy still has not been told which post triggered the suspension. Mike Vacirca, co-owner of LGBTQIA+ nightclub Anthem, said his business received a similar message from Instagram.
“We got a notification from Instagram that said your account has been suspended and you could appeal,” Vacirca said. “We appealed immediately, and then three days later we got a permanent ban for our account.”
Both owners said their accounts were flagged for human exploitation and said they do not believe a person reviewed their appeals before the bans were upheld.
“So I understand that they’re operating at scale, but if it’s a severe enough consequence and it’s a severe enough reason, there should be humans doing some kind of review in this process,” Vacirca said.
Llewellyn said Savoy has also struggled to reach someone at Meta.
“Now we’re going over a week now, and we still haven’t had an actual conversation with a human being from Meta trying to resolve the issue,” he said.
While reporting the story, News 6 found other LGBTQIA+ nightclubs in places including Los Angeles and Texas had also reported Instagram account suspensions or disabled accounts.
Anthem was eventually able to get its account back, Vacirca said, but not before the business created a backup account to reconnect with customers.
“We were able to get people onto the backup account and reconnect with some of our community,” he said. “But we went from 12,500 people down to 1,000 people. It’s a huge hit.”
At Savoy, Llewellyn said the business has started a third Instagram account because this is not the first time it has had issues with account access. The loss of Instagram has made it harder for the club to promote events.
“We’re not able to let people know about our events for the week or for the weekend or anything,” Llewellyn said. “And normally we would be paying them to advertise that as well.”
News 6 first emailed Meta on Wednesday and followed up Thursday asking what triggered the suspensions and whether a human reviewed the appeals. This story will be updated if Meta responds.
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