A Santa Monica influencer and activist who documented Tanzania's deadly post-election crackdown to millions of followers has filed a 36-page lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of shutting down her accounts under pressure from the same government that sought her arrest. Mange Kimambi, 46, says she used Instagram and WhatsApp to expose alleged killings and mobilize peaceful protests in Tanzania, only to watch her accounts disappear one by one over the following months.
Kimambi filed the lawsuit in San Mateo County Superior Court in late August, according to Impact Newswire, putting her case in Meta's home judicial district. The suit accuses Meta of false advertising and fraudulent and unfair business practices, and it claims Tanzania's government pressured the company to scrub her social media presence, as reported by the New York Post. Kimambi, a U.S. citizen who moved to the country in 2012 and now lives in California, is not seeking damages. Instead, she wants Meta to identify the governments involved in enforcement pressure against her and to disclose when foreign-government pressure influences its content decisions.
Violence Erupted After a Disputed Election
The lawsuit traces back to Tanzania's October 29, 2025 presidential election, in which the government declared incumbent Samia Suluhu Hassan the winner with nearly 98% of the vote after her leading opponents were prevented from running. The disputed result triggered protests and a deadly security crackdown, with protesters tearing down banners of Hassan and burning a police station in Dar es Salaam. An official Tanzanian Commission of Inquiry report submitted to Hassan in April found that at least 518 people died of unnatural causes, including gunshot wounds inflicted by state security forces, during and after the election, according to Amnesty International.
Tanzanian authorities enforced a complete nationwide internet shutdown from October 29 to November 3, 2025, according to Amnesty International, cutting off local reporting and turning U.S.-based diaspora activists like Kimambi into primary channels for disseminating evidence of the violence. Three of her Instagram accounts contained calls for peaceful protests and criticism of the Tanzanian government, per the lawsuit facts reported by the Post. Tanzanian authorities later accused her of inciting deadly protests, and the country's attorney general vowed to arrest her and sought her extradition.
Money-Laundering Charges Kimambi Calls Political
Tanzanian prosecutors registered Economic Crime Case No. 000021172/2025 against Kimambi in Dar es Salaam, accusing her of laundering roughly $56,000 through revenue from her mobile app between March 1 and March 31, 2022, according to The Chanzo. Kimambi has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated. She originally built her audience through the Mange Kimambi App, Tanzania's first subscription-based pay-to-read gossip app, before publicly pivoting the platform exclusively to political activism in June 2025, the outlet reports.
Meta disabled Kimambi's WhatsApp account in November before restoring it in January, but her Facebook account has not been indicated as restored, and her Instagram accounts remain disabled. According to Meta's own transparency report, Tanzanian regulators requested restrictions on three of Kimambi's Instagram accounts, and Meta said the risks of not complying included having its platforms blocked inside Tanzania altogether. The lawsuit alleges Meta threatened to block its own platforms in Tanzania rather than lose access to the country's market, and argues that the Tanzanian government turned to Meta and got what it could not obtain on its own.
Meta Points to Its Recidivism Policy
Meta has maintained that Kimambi's account removals were governed strictly by its global recidivism policy, which prohibits users from creating replacement accounts after an earlier account was removed for violating community standards, and the company said it removed her accounts on that basis rather than in response to outside pressure. That defense sits alongside a December 2025 acknowledgment reported by allAfrica that Meta had restricted fellow Tanzanian activist Maria Sarungi-Tsehai's Instagram account inside Tanzania under a formal legal order from regulators, a restriction it later reversed following public outcry. Kimambi paid for Meta Verified in hopes of reaching human customer support but says she received no help when her accounts were erased.
Kimambi has more than 10 million followers, and she has called Meta's actions a “grave injustice.” She appealed directly to Donald Trump in a December X post, asking him to publicly pressure Meta to reinstate her accounts. She has also urged Congress to give activists legal recourse when social media companies remove accounts without transparency, due process or a clear path to appeal.
Congress Has Already Pushed Meta on the Issue
Representative Joe Wilson pressed Meta in a January letter to resist becoming an enforcement arm of foreign authoritarian governments, saying a foreign government appeared to have successfully intimidated a U.S. citizen and compelled an American corporation to suppress her protected speech. Human Rights Watch reported in May that the Tanzanian government has refused to publish the full findings of its election inquiry or establish criminal liability for security personnel, prompting international civil society calls for United Nations Human Rights Council intervention.
Activists and digital rights groups have noted that Hassan's government expanded strategic and resource alliances with China, Russia and the United Arab Emirates in 2024 and 2025, insulating her administration from Western diplomatic pressure over human rights abuses. The crackdown on dissent predates the election violence: in April 2025, six months before the vote, Tanzanian police arrested Tundu Lissu, chairman of the main opposition party Chadema, and charged him with treason, according to Human Rights Watch. For Kimambi, the California courtroom now represents one of the few remaining venues where she believes accountability is still possible.
