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INSTAGRAM’S SHADOW:
The Story Of How Instagram censors artists, erases the LGBTQ community, and shames women’s bodies.
While galleries, art museums, and community venues are shuttered social media platforms are crucial to cultural growth. Instagram’s Shadow shows how artists are changing their work, censoring themselves, and finding clever ways to undermine oppressive algorithms and trolls. Through the stories of 17 artists we discover how artists are being censored and fighting back.
From an artist sculpting plus-sized models, a cancer survivor, an artist/web-cam-girl with 3million followers, a publisher of queer art book, to the inventor of the male nipple pasty, this show decodes Instagram’s secret methods for censoring and throttling artists. Artists include: Betty Tompkins, Christen Clifford, Chiara No, Clarity Haynes, Joanne Leah, Kyle Quinn (RawMeatCollective), Karlheinz Weinberger, Kumasi Barnett, Lissa Rivera, Leah Schrager, Michael X Rose, Micol Hebron, Peter Clough, Shona McAndrew, Steve Lock (and Bill Arning), Sara Jimenez, Tiffany Saint Bunny (@TruckSlutsMag).
Instagram’s Shadow takes it’s title from Instagram’s well documented “Shadow Ban” punishment, keeping artists from reaching their audiences. This allows instagram to throw a dark cloak over large segments of it’s user base, making them tangibly invisible. The shadow analogy is both psychological and quite literal.
Though this show is Instagram specific, it says something greater about how corporations / mainstream America are visually sterilizing the arts, LGBTQ communities, and women. The ramifications of anti nudity policies as well as how Instagram (in particular) protects and benefits from trolls becomes quickly apparent. Instagram fosters a “McCarthyist” culture where artists are fearful of blacklists and shadow bans. There is no distinction between pornography and fine art photography, exploitive hateful content or artworks fighting mainstream biases.
In this show we explore a clear double standard where celebrity power users are able to post increasingly sexualized nude content. We explain how the “nudity vs obscenity” conversation degrades women (whose nipples are banned while male nipples are allowed). How hiding behind a nudity policy allows Instagram to enforce a standard of fat shaming, banning plus-sized, and hiding non-normative bodies. In addition these policies work to visibly erase a whole queer archive of photographs.
Under Instagram’s heavy shadow peaks a tiny ray of light. The company knows their policies effect artist, LGBTQ and non-conforming communities. In October 2019 Instagram hosted a meeting to discuss these issues with artists. Unfortunately little actionable data was made public from this meeting and Instagram continues to censor artists while still allowing celebrity nudity, objectification of women, rape, drug use, racism, gun violence, and hateful content.
This story is not over and like all censorship struggles, we must keep fighting back and keep being vocal.