Instagram bans, unbans Iron Dome Coffee
Founder fights stealth decision, gets surprise reinstatement after deluge of antisemitic and anti-Israel hate posts
Just about a month ago — on March 21 — we published “Supporting Israel, One Cup at a Time,” by Abigail Klein Leichman, about Iron Dome Coffee.
The company sells coffee that the young entrepreneur whose brainchild it is, Justin Yehuda, curates carefully. (He’s a Gen Z-er. They curate.)
But Mr. Yehuda’s goal goes far beyond sourcing and selling quality coffee online. That’s a means to an end, and the end is to support Israel. Mr. Yehuda — who’s from Tenafly and whose parents still live there — is the product of a fiercely Jewish education, has relatives in Israel, and has a deep connection to the community. So 10 percent of the profits from his company go to support Israeli nonprofits, and all of it — its packaging, its promotions, its public face, its presence online — demonstrates his love for the country and its people.
It’s what’s called Coffee with a Cause.
But as our original story made clear, Mr. Yehuda has been plagued by messages so full of hate that they nearly burn the screen. He’s been told to die, told that his death would help the world, that the Nazis didn’t kill enough Jews, that Hitler stopped too soon, and many other venom-dripping messages of ill will.
And then he was banned from Instagram. And then, a week later, equally unexpectedly, he was reinstated.
Why? It’s hard to say, because Instagram doesn’t deign to explain its decisions, even when they affect account-owners’ livelihoods, but the likely answer for the ban is that some of his haters complained about him to Instagram — and maybe he was reinstated — just at press time! — because he said he’d go to the media.
As Mr. Yehuda tells the story, his business had been flourishing. (To fill in some of his backstory, he’s 23 years old, a Schechter Bergen, Leffell School, and Cornell graduate who worked as a consultant until October 7 happened. That outpouring of evil caused him to rethink his priorities and led him to form Iron Dome Coffee, which allows him to both support Israel and support himself. Iron Dome is the U.S.-designed, IDF-enhanced anti-missile system that protects Israel.)
Iron Dome Coffee is on all the obvious social media platforms, Mr. Yehuda said, but it’s been most active on Instagram; he’s not sure why, he said, but that’s where most customers have found him. That page “has been incredibly active and vibrant,” he said. “I had 11,000 followers in only a month’s time,” he said; the company’s been open for business for about two months. “That was really impressive. I was working really hard on ecommerce.”
And then, last Thursday, “I woke up and clicked on the Instagram icon. It’s the first thing I do every morning when I wake up. Because you never know. I might have gained another 100 followers just on any random day.”
Instead, he saw that his page wasn’t there.
“I was completely dumbfounded,” he said. “Where did my page go? The reason that Iron Dome Coffee has been very successful so far is because I’ve launched successful advertisements on social media taking advantage of this new wave of business.
“When I realized that my account was no longer there, I was devastated.
“So I reached out to close friends and family, and to influencers I’ve connected with, and I asked the influencers if anything like this has happened to them before.
“And the influencers told me that this is an example of mobs of pro-Palestinian supporters online putting my account in a group chat and saying, everybody, let’s get this account banned from Instagram.” Which they can do, “simply by reporting it for things like hate speech or bullying or harassment.”
There is no hate speech or bullying or harassment on Mr. Yehuda’s website, except in the comments that are aimed at him, rather than by him, but no matter.
“What’s crazy to me is that when I started the company, I knew that I’d have to deal with antisemitic attacks online. It’s when I report it that it gets fascinating.”
Because what happens when Mr. Yehuda reported those attacks is absolutely nothing. “They don’t get taken down. They get as dark as death threats.” But because they stay up, “I have so much evidence,” he said. “Every time I get a hate message, I document it. I report it.
“That’s what gets really fascinating, and shows me that maybe there’s some sort of systemic issue with the platform. When I report them, they don’t get taken down. An overwhelming majority of the time, I get a notification telling me, ‘We reviewed this message and see nothing wrong with it.’
“I get messages saying things like ‘I’m going to find you and kill you.’ It’s that black and white.”
But “I got hit with a ban,” he said. “Not a temporary ban. Not a warning. They issued me a final ban, with no warning, and no explanation.”
Instagram, which is owned by Meta (ne Facebook), is notoriously opaque. It’s a free service and offers very little actual customer service to its users, who, like people who use Facebook, TikTok, X, or any other social media platform, are in some (many, perhaps most) senses the product that those platforms offer to their actual customers, the advertisers.
Meta posts its community standards, which it says apply to Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads, on a section of its website called, with heavy-handed irony, its Transparency Center. (It’s at transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards.)
Most of the page is standard bureaucratic feel-good gobbledygook, but this is what Meta says about “Our commitment to voice”:
“The goal of our Community Standards is to create a place for expression and give people a voice. Meta wants people to be able to talk openly about the issues that matter to them, whether through written comments, photos, music, or other artistic mediums, even if some may disagree or find them objectionable. In some cases, we allow content — which would otherwise go against our standards — if it’s newsworthy and in the public interest….”
Content occasionally is taken down, the page tells readers: “when we limit expression, we do it in service of one or more of the following values: authenticity… safety… privacy… and dignity….”
It spells out those four values.
It is clear that Mr. Yehuda violated none of them. “There is nothing to object to on my page, unless you just hate Israel and everything connected with it,” he said. His commenters frequently do, but he never has answered them in kind. “I have never made any comments like that,” he said.
He tried to get in touch with Instagram. “It used to have a line that you could dial, but ever since AI has emerged, they’ve replaced it entirely.”
Still, he kept calling, and after hours and repeated dialing, “someone like a human being, finally responded, and said ‘send us more information,’” he said. That was “Paula” from the “Meta Pro Team,” who kept telling him, stiltedly, to wait.
On Monday, Paula blandly told him the ban would be upheld, without telling him why. In response, Mr. Yehuda wrote, “I am getting the media involved.”
He heard back once more from Paula, but again the response offered no information, and certainly no comfort.
“I will have to start again from scratch,” he said then.
“This is a big deal because I knew that there would be hate comments, and I was willing to tolerate it, and to meet it head-on, because that’s the price of the deal you make. But to see Instagram not only take their side, but to rush to permanently ban me tells me something.
“And it makes me wonder if it is the case that every business that supports Israel meets this roadblock, and do some of them not recover from getting knocked out by this mob of pro-Palestinian supporters online?
“It’s very much the same people who are so active in colleges. They’re 10 times more active online because there are no repercussions for the things you say online.” If a commenter wants to be anonymous — and most do — that’s easy to do.
It’s not even possible to tell if the ban was done by AI, directed by some frighteningly smart, disarmingly personal-seeming but actually impersonal algorithm, or by a human being making hateful decisions. Nor is it clear if Paula is a person or a bot.
Mr. Yehuda was depressed but not deterred, but he was not going to give up. When he considered what to do, “I thought about this as something that I will need to deal with over and over again. Is it even possible to grow a pro-Israel brand online?
“And then I considered why I started this company, and I considered what the goal of this company is. The goal of Iron Dome Coffee is to unite the Jewish and broader pro-Israel communities, in spite of antisemitism.
“Hatred is something that has existed since the dawn of time, and just because it’s directed at me doesn’t mean that I need to give up because of this. This is just a minor roadblock, and if I need to start a new page, if I need to start 10 new pages, I will. I’m going to give it everything I have, because I really believe in what we’re trying to build here — unity in the pro-Israel community.
He’d try again on Instagram, he said. “And I’m active on other platforms,” including a website.
One unequivocably good thing has come out of the situation.
“The community has been so eager to reach out to me and to offer kind words,” Mr. Yehuda said. “I know it sounds super cliched, but it’s almost like a sixth sense that Jewish people and pro-Israel people have. In moments of difficulty like this one, we know to stick together and to offer support to the community.
“Seeing this intense outpouring of support from the community is exactly the reason that I did this in the first place, and it’s why I’m going to keep going. It’s why I’m not giving up.
And then, on Wednesday morning, with no notification, no word from Paula, the page reappeared.
Why? Who knows. “It’s crazy,” Mr. Yehuda said. But he’ll take it.
Iron Dome Coffee’s website is irondomecoffee.com; you can buy coffee, mugs, and other merch there. You also can sign up for his weekly newsletter. You can find him, at least for now, on Instagram. And he welcomes email, at justin@irondomecoffee.com.
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