The Facebook page operated by Team Mohamed has been restored after being suspended earlier this month, following intervention by a United States attorney who wrote to Meta demanding that the account be reinstated.

The page, which has more than 500,000 followers, disappeared from Facebook on September 4. At the time, the circumstances surrounding its removal were unclear. The page had disappeared while two of Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s phones were in police custody.

Mohamed has now said the page was restored after his team engaged a US attorney to write Facebook. According to a September 10 letter, the law firm wrote to Instagram/Meta’s General Counsel requesting the immediate reinstatement of the account.

The letter identified the account as the “Team Mohamed” Facebook account and said it had been disabled on September 4 following a notification alleging a trademark infringement. “Mr. Mohamed maintains that none of the aforementioned ban reasons are justified or accurate,” the letter stated, requesting reinstatement and offering to waive legal claims relating to the account if it was restored by September 24.

Facebook subsequently restored the Team Mohamed page, and Mohamed said the reinstatement followed the attorney giving Facebook a September 24 deadline. “After the authority gives them a deadline of the 24th, then the page was reinstated,” he said.

A separate Facebook notice also indicates that the We Invest In Nationhood (WIN) page was suspended on September 24 over an alleged trademark-rights infringement. Facebook said the page had been reported by a third party and that a member of its team subsequently took action.

The notice provided an option to request a review and stated that the page had 179 days remaining to request one.

Mohamed, however, said he believes that email addresses provided by Facebook as belonging to persons claiming ownership of the names were checked and found to be fake.“We have not seen anything online for them,” he said.

The Team Mohamed page’s disappearance had previously prompted questions because of its size and its importance to Mohamed’s political communication. The page had more than 500,000 followers. 

The page’s reappearance was confirmed publicly on September 25 and Mohamed said the restoration was significant because of the size of the audience built by the page. “Why would I want to take a page down that got a following of 540,000?” he said. “Every single post I would make about four or 500,000 persons would see it in a 24-hour span.”

He said the page had previously reached between 50 million and 70 million people in a month, according to the page’s analytics. “I am so happy that the page is reinstated and I’m waiting patiently so that we can start publishing back on the page,” he said.

However, despite the page’s return, Mohamed said he remains temporarily restricted from carrying out activities including publishing, liking and commenting.

He said he has not yet been given a timeframe for when those restrictions will be lifted.