Stefan Mileschin

Aussie artist says it is not fair dinkum

Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Aussie disabled artist found herself kicked off all social media and effectively invisible.

In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate. In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work.

On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers. She had fewer than 1,000 followers when until Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name to Meta.

Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. "You are now a millionaire", one person wrote on her account. Another warned: "fb isn't gonna buy it, they're gonna take it." On November 2, exactly that happened.

Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled.

https://fudzilla.com/news/54048-face...meta-disappear