Pinterest Confirms Erroneous Removals of Many Accounts

Has your Pinterest account been incorrectly flagged, or even worse, suspended recently, despite you not breaking any of the platform’s rules?

You’re not alone.

Over the past few weeks, Pinterest has been dealing with a range of user complaints about account bans, despite no violation being reported.

Many have speculated on the possible reason for the suspensions, with the most common issue seemingly being related to “anatomy” posts, and content which Pinterest has incorrectly identified as being in violation of its rules around adult material.

And while Pinterest did acknowledge the account deactivations issue recently, it didn’t provide an explanation for the error.

Till today:

As you can see, Pinterest has now attributed the erroneous suspensions to “over-enforcement” of its rules, which saw a range of profiles incorrectly flagged as being in violation.

The error was not, as had been speculated by many, a result of an over-reliance on AI for moderation and enforcement elements.

Pinterest dismissed that speculation in a statement to TechCrunch, again noting that the mistaken account suspensions have been due to an expanded effort to detect and remove problematic content. Which has obviously stretched a little further than intended.

The focus on adult content could be related to Pinterest’s broader efforts to improve safety on the platform, with the company also recently adding new prompts that warn teen users about opening the app during typical school hours.

Maybe, in its expanding push to maximize younger user safety, it’s also moving to remove more offensive material, while Pinterest has also been dealing with an influx of AI-generated content of late.

That could relate to adult images generated by AI tools as well, and it seems like somewhere amongst all of this, it upped its enforcement settings a little too high, leading to a range of mistakes.

Pinterest says that it has now resinstated most of the accounts that were mistakenly deactivated, and it’s in the process of updating its systems to weed out the errors.

But if you were impacted by an unjustified suspension, you can get in touch with Pinterest for assistance.