?A weird meta experience?: artist has @metaverse handle restored after Meta disables it

Thea-Mai Baumann's Instagram profile is an eclectic mix of pink-lipped selfies, David Bowie memes, colorful recordings of her hologram artwork, shots of skyscrapers in Shanghai and portraits of friends tinted in Valencia, Amaro and Toaster, all filters from Instagram's early days.

Baumann's account, which operates under the handle @metaverse, features 10 years of her life and work. All that became inaccessible to her when she suddenly found herself disabled from her account on 2 November, days after Facebook, which owns Instagram, changed its umbrella corporate name to Meta.

A message flashed on her screen: "Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else."

As Facebook's corporate name change attempts to reflect the virtual world that the tech company considers the future of the internet, Baumann found herself suddenly excluded from it.

"I guess I was pretty surprised but I kind of had a feeling something was going to go down," the Sydney-based artist and technologist told the Guardian in a phone interview. "A couple of days before my account was disabled, I was getting a lot of people reaching out to me, asking to buy my handle and also other people saying that they wanted my account," she said.

Baumann did what she thought would protect her ownership over her Instagram handle. Days before her account was disabled, she minted an NFT of the first picture that she took under her @metaverse handle, an image of a fake flamingo inspecting a plant.

"I just had a feeling that the @metaverse digital real estate was going to become quite pervasive in the media landscape," Baumann said, adding, "I wanted to create a digital record of my account and prove my ownership over that @metaverse handle."