Meta Has Restored Our Threads Account, Following Backlash
Our 200,000-follower account was disabled on 8 May 2026 with no specific explanation
Update: Meta has restored the Crust News account on Threads. No notification was sent, nor explanation offered. The account, removed on earlier today, as noted in the article below. After periodically refreshing the profile, it simply reappeared at a point today.
Platforms like Meta should not remove independent press accounts without notice, and reverse those decisions with the same silence. In fact, we are willing to say that the practice of removing our account without notice was likely a violation of our rights as EU citizens, and have already made the relevant complaints to challenge Meta on that basis.
To readers who voiced their opposition publicly and to Meta directly, thank you. The platform has said nothing about its reasoning at either end, so we cannot say why we were reinstated, but we saw your posts fighting for us, and assume that has played some part in correcting this wrong.
It has come to our attention that our account was one of many removed in the last few days, as accounts fighting for human rights and justice disappeared alongside a removal of “bots” by Meta. We are looking into this case further, and will be launching our investigation into the types of accounts that have been on the other end of Meta’s careless sweep of their website.
If you’ve been affected: We are looking to gather accounts of similar incidents, account removals, suspensions, shadow-bans, or content suppression, across Threads, Instagram, and Facebook. If this has happened to you, please write to us at metacensorship@crustnews.com.
On 8 May 2026, Meta disabled the Crust News Threads account. Our account had more than 200,000 followers, followers who will no longer get news updates that many people relied on.
The full statement from Meta says:
“We’ve disabled your account. You no longer have access to crustnews. Account disabled on 8 May 2026.
Why this happened: We’ve reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.
What this means: No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request another review of this decision.”
No post is identified to have broken any rule, no specific rule is cited as an explanation, and the appeal has been rejected by their AI, with no option to fight the removal in any other way.
The removal came within 24 hours of Crust News publishing material documenting United States regime violations of the April 8 ceasefire with Iran. The last article shared to our Threads account, was the article titled “The USA Breaks The Ceasefire (Again)”, at a time when the U.S. ruling regime were busy spreading the false story that they had responded to Iranian attacks. We must point out that our accounting was the correct one, and is a matter of recorded fact.
USA Violates Iran Ceasefire (Again)
The US regime struck three sites in southern Iran on Thursday night, after they violated the April 7 ceasefire agreement with an attack on an Iranian oil tanker. The USA claims that the attacks inside Iran targeted missile launch sites used in Iran’s response to the initial…
The category is the story
Meta’s explanation that our account doesn’t follow “community standards on account integrity” implies that we are not who we say we are, as this is the notification the company applies to fake accounts, impersonation, account hijacking, and coordinated inauthentic behaviour. It is the category reserved for accounts that are not what they claim to be.
Crust News is a public-facing independent news outlet, operating under the same name for over 2 years, with reporting valued by many. Our work has been cited by sources across the internet, including the U.S. government itself, a government who has consistently taken issue with our work to hold their actions to account publicly. If the U.S. government has publicly named us and our founder, there is no basis to the idea Meta has presented as their explanation.
We assume that Meta chose this classification, as it results in the immediate removal of an account, a reality that we are almost certain Meta has wanted for quite some time. The official Threads account had restricted our account from @ mentioning theirs, after we had consistently “ratioed” their account when calling out double standards by the team at Meta.
This had been coming
The disablement is the endpoint of a sustained pattern. In the months preceding it, the Crust News Threads account was subject to a series of platform actions for which Meta provided no explanation, and still has provided no explanation:
Random account lockouts, lasting hours to days, with no notice and no stated cause, we would stay on the login screen until the system decided we could access our account.
Automatic flagging of posts referencing ICE List, our parallel public-interest project documenting United States immigration enforcement activity. Posts mentioning ICE List were either removed outright or left visible only after the account was stripped of its ability to like, comment, share.
Days-long suspensions of core account functionality, again without notice or explanation.
The aforementioned restrictions related to the official Threads account, we had no ability to comment on posts made by the official Threads account, and could not mention their account. This is likely because the users of their platform sided with us more than they sided with Threads themselves.
The cumulative effect was an editorial decision. Crust News stopped mentioning ICE List on social media, as the posts no longer reached the publics’ eye, and any mention simply prevented us from our normal work. That decision was made by Crust News, but the conditions that produced it were made by Meta.
This is what platform censorship produces, journalists who have stopped writing certain words because the powers at be do not want them heard. The censorship is not an accidental side effect of the enforcement system, the enforcement system is the method they use to censor us.
ICE List is a legal, public-interest journalism project. It documents the activity of a state apparatus, it is sourced overwhelmingly from material that the subjects themselves have made publicly available. There is no plausible reading of any platform’s community standards under which routine journalistic reference to its existence marks a violation. Meta’s automated systems treated such references as violations anyway, a practice entirely debunked as harmful by the outlet Wired.
We cannot download our information
Crust News operates from the Netherlands. Meta delivers Threads to European Union users through Meta Platforms Ireland Limited and is designated as a Very Large Online Platform under the EU Digital Services Act (Regulation 2022/2065).
The DSA imposes specific obligations on platforms when they remove user accounts. Among them:
Article 17 requires a clear and specific statement of reasons, including the facts and circumstances relied upon and reference to the contractual or legal ground for the action. As explained above, this has not happened.
Article 20 requires platforms to operate an internal complaint-handling system that is free of charge and that users can use for at least six months following the decision. It appears we are cannot avail of such a service.
Article 21 entitles users to refer the dispute to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body, this is not an option that has been presented to us.
Article 86 allows users to lodge complaints with the relevant Digital Services Coordinator, in the Netherlands, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM). While we will do this, this has not been facilitated by Meta in any form.
Meta’s notice to Crust News states “You cannot request another review of this decision.” That language appears to be in direct tension with Article 20.
In parallel, Meta’s “Download your information” function, the mechanism by which users exercise data access and portability rights under Articles 15 and 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation, has not functioned for Crust News following the account disablement. Repeated attempts have stalled indefinitely at the loading stage, regardless of the device, browser, app or any other variable. The right to obtain a copy of one’s personal data does not lapse when a platform deletes an account, and we will pursue action on this basis should Meta continue to withhold our data from us.
Crust News is referring this case to the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) as Dutch Digital Services Coordinator, to the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) as the Dutch data protection authority, and to the European Commission’s DSA enforcement team, which has direct supervisory jurisdiction over Meta as a designated VLOP. We have made contact with the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) regarding the wider press freedom dimensions of the case.
This is pattern beyond Crust News
Meta’s suppression of journalism covering Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and United States foreign policy in the region has been documented by 7amleh, Human Rights Watch, Access Now, and the Business for Social Responsibility audit Meta itself commissioned after the May 2021 assault on Gaza, an audit that found Meta’s actions had an adverse human rights impact on Palestinian users. The pattern has intensified, not corrected, since October 2023.
Independent journalists, Palestinian outlets, and accounts covering the Israeli regime’s military operations have reported account removals, content takedowns, and reach suppression on a scale that no amount of “automated enforcement error” framing can absorb.
In our case, we must look for a reason for our censorship, as a clear reason has not been provided by Meta themselves. Our last action on their platform was to correct a false narrative presented by the U.S. government, so we must assume that had some part to play in stealing our voice from our followers.
A ceasefire is a matter of public record. Its violation is a matter of public record. Reporting that violation is journalism. The White House may disagree with a pattern of events, but the White House is not a place where truth finds a home. In the case of yesterday’s ceasefire violations, the White House is a place where misinformation was sourced from, we are well within our rights to inform our users of such.
Meta’s response to that journalism was to remove the platform from which it was published. Meta’s response to the violation itself was nothing, the accounts of U.S. government officials remain online, despite actively sharing misinformation to the public.
That is the double standard of life in 2026, factual reporting on state violence treated is as an integrity breach, while the state providing false justification for violence is offered a shield from any correction.
We will likely leave Meta
Should the decision be reversed, we will be very happy to return to the platform and inform our followers who thrust so much trust upon us. If not, this is the end of Crust News on Meta platforms. We will not create a replacement Threads account, we will not return to Instagram or Facebook, accounts that bizarrely remain online, but do not have the reach of our Threads account. The pattern is too consistent, Meta has long abused their platforms to gatekeep reality from their users, and we do not anticipate that changing.
Crust News will publish on Substack as our primary platform, with Bluesky as our supplemental channel. Both platforms have, to date, treated our reporting, including coverage of ICE List, immigration enforcement, and the conduct of state actors, as journalism, rather than as a community guidelines violation.
For the first time in over 4 months, Crust News will be able to write the words “ICE List” without an automated enforcement system flagging the post and stripping the account of its ability to engage with its own audience. That sentence should not be controversial, on Meta platforms, it was.
The 200,000-follower audience built on Threads cannot be recovered without a reversal of the decision by Meta. That is the point of removing it, we always had enough followers to question Meta, and Meta never liked us for that. We should not need to remind users that our ICE List website became the only website censored in a manner where it would be deleted when users typed the name into a post, a fact that hit mainstream news in February. Our feud with Meta has always been public, has always been left users siding with us, but has always been policed by Meta themselves.
Readers who followed Crust News on Threads can find us on Substack and on Bluesky. We will face a difficult time now, as a sudden loss of 200,000 followers will lead to a financial hit, we would encourage those who wish to support us to consider becoming a free or paid subscriber here at crustnews.com, or help us out with a donation at our Buymeacoffee page, if you have the means to. Our journalistic efforts will continue with or without Meta platforms to share them on, and tips can be sent securely via our Hushline page.
We thank you all for your continued support, and hope this setback is merely just a first step into a world where we can share our voice with more freedom than had been granted to us before.
Crust News will continue reporting on the United States regime’s conduct in the Iran conflict, on Israeli regime operations in Gaza and Lebanon, on the Homeland Security Task Force, and on every other beat that Meta’s enforcement systems treated as a violation. The reporting was the violation. We are choosing platforms that do not treat it as one.
I disengaged completely from all things Meta when my post relating to a JFK statement along the lines of... you should not push an enemy to the point of humiliation, particularly when they have access to nuclear weapons... was deleted from FB & IG for similar vague reasons. No recourse. Just deleted. When shutting down FB which is challenging I discovered my posts to my 5kfollowers were being shadow banned from them. I found a red exclamation point hidden from me that proved so. I was and still an anti-genocide and pro-palestine. That was my crime.
Still following here! I'm on Blue sky but don't like the platform. As long as I can find your informative posts here, I'll be here.