How a ‘robot lawyer’ could help you get unbanned from social media

Just weeks after Facebook rebranded itself to “Meta,” the longtime owner of @metaverse Instagram suddenly found herself locked out of the account she had run for years. A message told Thea-Mai Baumann she was suspended for impersonation, though she had never pretended to be anyone else. Her account was returned after The New York Timeswrote a story about the ordeal, but the company never offered an explanation for how the mistake was made.

While what happened to her was unusual, one aspect of Baumann’s story is more common: that people who are wrongfully suspended from their social media accounts often have little or no recourse for getting them back (at least, not without media attention).

Now that group may have another option. The “robot lawyer” company DoNotPay, which offers automated legal services, has a new offering: getting social media accounts unbanned.

The new service, which is included with DoNotPay’s $36 monthly subscription, offers users an alternative to emailing companies’ help center bots or wiring appeals that may never get answered. Instead, DoNotPay asks users for information about what happened to them, and sends a letter to the relevant company’s legal department on their behalf.

“These platforms prioritize legal cases,” DoNotPay CEO …read more