Woman lost @metaverse Instagram handle days after Facebook name change

Thea-Mai Baumann had been posting on Instagram using the @metaverse handle for almost a decade when her account was deactivated on November 2nd.

“Your account has been blocked from pretending to be someone else,”[ads1]; the app told her.

Baumann was not quite sure what had happened, but the timing was curious. The account block came just days after Facebook announced its new name, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the name reflected the company’s new focus on the vision of the meta-verse, a virtual world meant to facilitate commerce, communication and more. Baumann’s @metaverse handle was suddenly a hot item.

This story is a decade of my life and work. “I did not want my contribution to the meta-verse deleted from the Internet,” Baumann told The New York Times. “It happens to women in technology, to women of color in technology, all the time.”

In 2012, when Baumann started Metaverse Makeovers, she grabbed the Instagram handle @metaverse to showcase her art and technology. The Australian had created an app that would display virtual holograms of the company’s nail designs. She envisioned making a whole line of clothes and accessories that would almost be expanded. After five years, funding ran dry, and she began using her Instagram account to promote her other work.

Baumann’s @metaverse account went relatively unnoticed over the years, attracting fewer than 1,000 followers. Then Facebook changed its name.

On October 28, Zuckerberg announced the change in his Connect 2021 keynote, saying that the Facebook name “just does not include everything we do.” Zuckerberg had been selling his idea of ​​the metaverse for several months, telling The Verge in an interview last summer that “the metaverse is a vision that spans many companies – the entire industry,” he said. “It is certainly not something that a company is going to build.”

Baumann, with his many years of experience in running a company based around and named after the concept, would apparently be an ideal partner in that venture.

After Zuckerberg’s keynote, Baumann began receiving unsolicited messages on Instagram, including someone offering to buy @metaverse from her. However, one person gave a warning: “fb are not going to buy it, they are taking it.”

It is unclear whether Meta / Facebook had anything to do with Baumann losing access to her account. Baumann tried to confirm her identity with Instagram, but she did not receive a response for several weeks. She tried to work with an intellectual property lawyer to see what rights she had to get her account back, but she could not afford their services.

When a journalist heard about the story, things changed. On December 4, two days after a New York Times reporter contacted Meta about the account, Baumann suddenly gained access to @metaverse again.

“This account was mistakenly removed for counterfeiting and we have now restored it,” Stepha Otway, a Meta spokeswoman, told Ars. “We are sorry that this happened.”

Baumann’s experience can have a cooling effect on companies ‘and individuals’ willingness to participate in social media for fear of having their online identity arbitrarily confiscated. “Facebook has largely unimpeded discretion in assigning people’s Instagram usernames,” Rebecca Giblin, director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at the University of Melbourne, told The New York Times. “There can be good reasons for that – for example, if they are offensive or pretend to be someone in a way that causes confusion.”

“But the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of this power,” Giblin said. Users “have essentially no rights.”