» READ MORE: She’s 93, from Wales, and obsessed with the Mummers. She flew to Philadelphia to meet them.

“I fell in love with Philadelphia and would love to go back,” she said from her Swansea flat, marveling at how total strangers stopped her during the parade asking if she was “the grandma from Wales.”

“I will never ever forget it and I would love to go back tomorrow,” she said.

Still, Davidge’s granddaughter, Fiona Smillie-Hedges, reports not all is well back home. Davidge’s Instagram account “grandmas.adventures” was suspended for allegedly failing to follow the platform’s “community standards on account integrity.”

The family has inadvertently found itself among thousands of people who claim to have been erroneously banned thanks to faulty and overzealous artificial intelligence models. Like so many before her, Smillie-Hedges has not been able to get a hold of a human.

At stake for the grandmother, who jokes about never leaving her flat and the possibility of death with the slightest illness, is her window to the world, specifically Philadelphia. She’d amassed some 400 followers who shared her passion for the Mummers.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment.

The whole ordeal has been a blow to the family. Instagram was how the family was able to connect with Mummers in the first place and touch base with other Philadelphians who offered parade advice.

“She wouldn’t have been in the paper, or gone to the Mummers Museum, or met [Quaker City String Band Captain] Jimmy Good, or had any of the other captains,” said Smillie-Hedges. “It would have been a completely different trip.”

The family doesn’t know how to broach the subject with Davidge, though they feel they can’t keep her in the dark much longer. While Davidge doesn’t know how to navigate the platform, she likes to hear what people are saying and have her niece respond to comments. For now, she’s still responding to her TikTok followers.

Smillie-Hedges doesn’t want to tarnish the Philadelphia experience and she doesn’t know how to relay Instagram’s reason for the ban. She’s not quite sure she understands herself.

“We don’t allow people on Instagram to pretend to be someone well known or speak for them without permission,” read a standard explanation from Instagram, which also said no one would be able to see the account and Davidge’s information would be permanently deleted.

The only peccadillo Smillie-Hedges can think of is calling Davidge “Queen Mumm” on some posts, a nickname given to her by Jim Donio, host of the String Band Sessions podcast. To the British, Queen Mum can be a reference to Queen Elizabeth, who was also known as the Queen Mother, and is long dead.

While the stakes are somewhat low for Davidge and her granddaughter, they have found themselves in what Reddit forums claim is becoming a growing problem. Meta artificial intelligence models are inaccurately flagging and disabling accounts with little recourse for users.

Smillie-Hedges can’t get past the automated responses to request another review of the decision.

According to the BBC, paying for Meta Verified is one way to speak to a human but even that is not a surefire way to address account issues.

Businesses have reported losing thousands of followers after years of building their platform and in extreme cases, parents report being banned and accused of violating Meta’s child sexual exploitation policies.

Reports of the bans extend to Meta’s other platforms Facebook and WhatsApp. A Change.org petition with more than 54,000 signatures demands the tech company address the AI banning issues across its platforms.

For now, Smillie-Hedges made a quick post on TikTok telling people about the suspension and letting fans know the family was trying to get it back. She also began uploading some of Davidge’s videos on Facebook as an additional way to connect with people.

“I was worried people were going to think something bad had happened,” Smillie-Hedges said. “Some people are really invested in her.”

Donio, who first connected with Smillie-Hedges and Davidge on Instagram and made much of the VIP visit to Philly possible, said he’s tried to spread the word of the account mishap. He can now communicate with Smillie-Hedges and Davidge through email and video calls but he understands their frustration.

“I think the frustration that a lot of people feel is if you do something wrong or if you’ve miscommunicated something and then you want to resolve it, it’s virtually impossible to try to resolve it and explain your situation to a live person,” he said.

Smillie-Hedges is still hopeful that something can be done to change Meta’s mind about the account. In the meantime, she and her grandmother continue to reminisce and upload snippets of video from the visit.

Of the highlights there are many. There was the moment she met Good, who leads the Quaker City String Band. He surprised her while she visited the Mummers Museum.

Davidge woke up in her Center City hotel overlooking Broad Street just in time to greet 2026. Down below she saw two children play-fighting with Mummers umbrellas.

Then there was the parade itself where Davidge was treated like a VIP. Though the string band competition was postponed because of heavy winds that led to performer injuries, she still got to see bands show off their costumes and perform. The string bands were the main draw when Davidge discovered the Mummers weeks after her longtime husband’s death. She felt it was something they would have enjoyed together.

And who could forget the freezing cold, joked Davidge, adding people could hardly see her face because she was bundled deep in layers of blankets at certain points.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she mused. “What a wonderful opportunity to be able to go there and see it myself.”