Man banned from Instagram hours after posting shirtless image of himself and his dog

Wednesday, 11 March 2026

The image of Alex Baty and his dog that was uploaded to Instagram in October, “hours' before his account was suspended for violating Meta rules.

A New Zealander living in Australia has been banned from all Meta platforms, after he says he was wrongly accused of breaching the tech giant’s guidelines on child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity.

Alex Baty says Meta suspended his Instagram account in October, just “hours” after he changed his profile picture to an image of himself shirtless on his balcony, with his dog sitting on his lap. Meta has never confirmed which upload was the offending image. However Baty believes it to be the image with his dog due to the timing of his upload and subsequent ban.

“The photo I was banned for is very tame. I'd show my Nana that image,” Baty told Stuff.

A screenshot of Alex Baty's Instagram account before he was banned from the platform.

The 26-year-old insurance broker said he immediately appealed the ban, but it was several weeks before Meta responded and restored his Instagram account, apologising for getting it “wrong”.

The relief was short-lived though. A week later, he said his account was banned once again, along with access to all Meta platforms, even though he had removed what he believes was the offending image.

“It's very frustrating. My friends kind of joked around and said, ‘What did you actually do?’ But I did nothing,” he said.

“I suspect that the AI Meta uses for moderation saw that I deleted the photo. But who knows how their internal systems work? I just know it all started because of that photo.”

A screenshot of the message Baty received from Meta after his account was reinstated following the ban. However a week later he was suspended from all Meta platforms.

Meta was approached for comment but didn’t respond before the deadline.

Baty said the ban had taken a toll on his ability to socialise and date, with people often asking him for his Instagram handle.

“They want to see that you're a normal person, not a weirdo and I understand why. They ask why I don’t have Instagram. If I say the truth, or that I was banned for nudity, it sounds terrible,” he said.

Baty said the ban had taken a toll on his ability to socialise and date, with people often asking for his Instagram handle.

He had tried “every official channel” to restore his Instagram account, he said, which he had been using for 14 years.

“The appeal process doesn’t work. There’s no way to contact Meta directly. I even paid for Meta Verified, hoping it would help, but the support team keeps telling me to ‘wait for the appeal process’ or ‘that’s not our department’,” he said.

“Many people think I’ve blocked them, I’ve lost touch with friends overseas, and my ability to communicate with family has become extremely difficult. I text people, but I do find I get left out of things a lot more.”

Otago University senior lecturer, Michael Daubs, said little was known about the internal workings of Meta’s AI tools for moderating content, but the tech giant had built proprietary machine learning models to flag “problematic” text, video and photos.

“As soon as someone uploads something, it is subject to being scanned by these AI tools,” Daubs said.

“Only if the AI tools are unsure of what they are seeing they will kick it to one of their human content moderation teams.”

However, he said the AI tools could be flawed depending on what they were being trained on.

“It's not uncommon for AI tools to misidentify things. There are stories of AI image identification tools misconstruing things like pictures of fruit as nudity. So it does make mistakes,” he said.

Daubs said the social media giant primarily used AI for moderation nowadays, given the “overwhelming” volume of content uploaded to its platforms each day.

“If you think about Facebook, it alone has over a billion users worldwide. It's massive, probably terabytes of images alone that are posted every single day. It's just a huge load of data,” he said.

Baty said the photo with his dog was far more appropriate than much of the other content he had seen on Instagram.

“There are very explicit photos from all sorts of walks of life, you know, people who monetise off Instagram, like Only Fans,” he said.

“It's just crazy. It’s just a little photo of me and my dog.”

After the publication of this article Meta got in touch with Stuff saying, 'We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake.” Baty’s profile has since been reactivated again.