Two Instagram accounts of Charlie Hebdo journalists, who had posted the front page of the weekly with the reproduction of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, were temporarily disabled on Sunday.
The original publication of the cartoons prompted two jihadist brothers to invade the editorial staff of the magazine in Paris and kill twelve people. The weekly decided to republish the cartoons at the onset of the trial of the suspected helpers in the attack and those in its wake.
"These accounts were deleted by mistake. We reinstated them as soon as we became aware of them, and we apologised," Mélanie Agazzome, Instagram's communications director for France and southern Europe, told AFP.
All it takes is one report for an account to be deactivated, and those accounts had been flagged.
Charlie Hebdo's Instagram account "was not closed, was not censored, and some members shared the cartoons," Agazzome added.
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The cartoonist Coco and journalist Laure Dassy had complained on Twitter that their Instagram accounts had been deactivated after they rebroadcast the coverage of their newspaper, which had reproduced on Wednesday the cartoons of Mohammed published in 2006.
"Everything is restored. It is possible that massive reports from the cover may have caused Instagram accounts to be suspended automatically," Coco tweeted midday.
"The right to blasphemy cannot be diminished," Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot commented on Sunday, adding that it "is a right in the secular French Republic: we must fight for it to be respected.”
Titled “Tout ça pour ça” (“All that for that”), the issue with the reproduction of the Mohammed cartoons sold 200,000 copies from the first day and another 200,000 copies went on sale Saturday.
The Brussels Times
