A local bridal shop owner said her business is taking a hit after her Instagram and Facebook pages that she has built from the ground up were flagged and disabled by Meta.

She claimed she’s done nothing wrong and is calling on the tech giant to fix what she said is a growing problem for small businesses.

The owner of Celestial Brides in downtown Johnstown said her business relies heavily on social media to connect with customers, and, right now, that outlet is gone.

Owner Angela Seifert said, “Not only is social media our main form of communication and marketing, but this is a tool that we also use to generate sales. We have clients who we are currently losing.”

She added, “If a real human is able to access our account and go through, they’ll see that we not only are following the community guidelines, but we’re taking proactive steps to make sure that we’re doing everything by the books and correctly. We are really well aware that social media is a scary place, and we pride ourselves on keeping our environment safe and friendly and age appropriate.”

She said she opened Instagram and found a notice saying her account was flagged.

Minutes later, after filing an appeal, a second message told her the page was permanently disabled with no clear explanation.

She said her business relies on social media to post new dresses, message customers and she pays out of pocket to run ad campaigns.

She said, “We are heavily invested in the Meta company and that’s why it’s so disappointing that this happened to us, because we spend so much of our advertising funds on social media by boosting posts with Meta through Instagram and Facebook, generating ads.”

Seifert told 6 News that other small businesses across the country are reporting similar experiences, with no human customer support to intervene.

She said, “It only took me a couple of Google searches, TikTok searches to see that this was not just happening to us. It is happening globally and there are innocent people, innocent businesses, who are getting flagged by this.”

She said the logistics of starting her pages over are more complicated than they seem.

She also said she’s tried everything; emails, support forums, even reaching out to state legislators.

6 News also tried reaching out to Meta for a statement on how this feature works but did not hear back.

In the meantime, she wants everybody to know they can still shop in-store and through her website.