A user on Instagram with the handle @metaverse noticed that her 10-year-old Instagram account was gone.

The New York Times was the first to report that Thea Mai Baumann, an Australian artist/technologist, received a message via Instagram notifying that her account had been blocked for pretending to belong to someone else.

To set things straight, five days earlier, Instagram’s parent company Facebook (NASDAQ:) changed its umbrella corporate name to Meta, signaling intensified efforts to enter into the metaverse space. When asked by the NYT about the matter, Instagram did not answer the question.

Baumann’s Instagram account has been associated with @metaverse since 2012. This account was created for Metaverse Makeovers, her augmented reality business. Some of her products include Metaverse Nails, which allows users to try out virtual “glam.”

Although Baumann isn’t such a big artist on the social media platform, her Instagram followers grew from less than 1,000 on October 28 (the day Facebook rebranded) to about 2,800 currently. The NYT reported that Baumann said the account included a decade of her work and life.

I don’t wish my contributions to the metaverse be erased from the internet.

She claimed that she attempted to restore the account for around a month without success. Instagram did not do anything until the NYT covered the matter. It was at this point that the social media platform admitted the error, claiming that the account was wrongly removed for “impersonation.”

Ms. Baumann plans to transform the experience into art. Ms. Baumann is interested in making the metaverse more inclusive than being dominated by Silicon Valley techno bros.

Baumann isn’t the only one who feels this way. The Sandbox’s co-founder Sebastien Borget recently voiced his fears about Big Tech threatening the freedom of the decentralized metaverse.

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