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SYDNEY, Australia — In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting in prime internet real estate.
In 2012, he opened an Instagram account with the name @metaverse, which he used in his creative works. In the account, he documented his life in Brisbane, where he studied fine arts, and his travels to Shanghai, where he founded an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers.
Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, had fewer than 1,000 followers, it announced on October 28. rename. From now on, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on metadata, a virtual world it saw as the future of the internet.
A few days ago, when the news broke, Ms. Baumann started receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram account. Someone wrote “You’re a millionaire now” on their account. Another warned: “fb will not buy, he will”.
On November 2, that’s exactly what happened.
When she tried to log in to Instagram early that morning, she found that the account had been disabled. The screen reads: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.”
Nine years later he wondered who he was impersonating now. He tried to authenticate with Instagram, but got no response for weeks. He spoke to an intellectual property lawyer, but he could only afford to review Instagram’s terms of service.
“This account is ten years of my life and business. “I didn’t want my contribution to metadata to be deleted from the internet,” he said. “It always happens to women in tech, women of color in tech,” added Ms. Baumann, who has Vietnamese heritage.
He launched Metaverse Makeovers in 2012. When a phone running his app was held over one of the complex real-world nail designs created by his team, the onscreen image showed holograms “exploding” from the nails. That was before Pokémon Go, before Snapchat and Instagram filters became a part of everyday life.
He saw the potential to scale the technology to clothing, accessories and beyond, but his investment money ran out in 2017 and he returned to the art world.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was investing heavily in his own futuristic vision of the metaverse – he called it “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.”
“The Metaverse,” said Mr. Zuckerberg, announcing his company’s new name, “will not be created by a single company.” Instead, he said he would welcome a range of creators and developers who offer “interoperable” offerings.
Cory Doctorow, a tech blogger and activist, said this candor comes with big caveats.
“He founded Facebook by creating a platform where other businesses meet with their customers,” Doctorow said, “but where Facebook structures the overall market and reserves the right to destroy those businesses through carelessness, malice or incompetence.”
This great power, governed by opaque policies and algorithms, extends to the company’s control over individual user accounts.
“Facebook has essentially unlimited discretion to tailor people’s Instagram usernames,” said Rebecca Giblin, director of the Australian Intellectual Property Research Institute at the University of Melbourne. “There may be good reasons for this – for example, if they are impersonating someone in a way that is offensive or confusing.”
“But the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of that power,” he said, adding that under Facebook’s policies, users have “essentially no rights.”
On December 2, one month after Ms. Baumann first applied to Instagram to get her account back, The New York Times contacted Meta to ask why the account had been disabled. An Instagram spokesperson said the account was “incorrectly removed due to impersonation” and will be restored. “We are sorry that this error has occurred,” he wrote.
Two days later the account was back online.
The spokesperson did not explain why it was flagged as impersonation or that it may have been impersonated. The company did not respond to further questions about whether the blocking was linked to Facebook’s rebranding.
Now that her account has been revived, Ms. Baumann plans to turn the saga into an art project she started last year, P.∞st_Lyfe, which is about death in the Metaverse. He’s also considering what he can do to ensure that the metaverse becomes the container he says he’s trying to build.
“I’m worried that I’ve been working in the metaverse for so long, 10 years,” he said. He fears his culture “may be disrupted by his Silicon Valley tech brethren, which I feel lacks vision and integrity.”
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