Earlier this week, Los Angeles punk band Suicidal Tendencies revealed that their Instagram account had been removed from the social media platform for three weeks. In the statement, posted on their reinstated Instagram, Suicidal Tendencies claimed that the account had been removed by the social media company due to the sensitive nature of their name. “Long story, this had nothing to do with ‘us,’ but everything to do with our name,” the band wrote. “This isn’t the first time we’ve been flagged but hopefully it will be the last. We’ll go into that more later.”
When reached by Pitchfork, a representative for Instagram’s parent company Facebook told Pitchfork “that the account was removed in error.” The representative stated, “We have policies in place that disallow people to promote or glorify suicide and self-harm, and in this case, our teams mistakenly flagged it as such based on the account name.”