Instagram disabled artist?s @metaverse handle after Facebook rebranded to Meta

An Instagram user with the handle @metaverse last month found herself blocked from her account, which featured a decade of her life and work - after parent company Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta.

On 28 October, Facebook, which owns Instagram, kept the social media platform Facebook so named but changed its umbrella corporate name to Meta - signaling an effort to reflect the virtual world that the tech giant considers the future of the internet.

On 2 November, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, suddenly found her account disabled, the New York Times first reported.

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

Baumann said she tried to verify her identity with Instagram over the next few weeks but received no response.

"This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet," Baumann told the outlet.

"That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time," the artist, who is of Vietnamese descent, added.