Instagram: Censorship of the Female Form
An “accidental” slip of the nip can be the end to your social profile.
I spoke in my last post about media accounting and the natural human behaviour to want to share and document pieces of your life. With the existence and popularity of social media, users often document and explore their identities and publish this form of accounting online (rather than in physical scrapbooks).
When delving into this topic, I started to wonder how I used social media to form and communicate my identity with those around me. If you look at my Instagram feed, my followers are probably under the impression that I go out a lot and seem particularly social, whereas in reality, I’m spending this weekend at home, in my tracksuit pants, head buried in law textbooks studying.
I’m not trying to say that social media is a lie or that the user’s themselves are liars; I’m merely making the point that we all have very different identities and given the time, place, and platform, we communicate them in different ways. Social media platforms enable users to showcase themselves and communicate their identities in any way they wish, well almost any way they wish. It is a known behaviour for social platforms to censor content that they consider interfering with their community guidelines. If the content is found to be infringing these guidelines, the platform acts as judge and jury by removing the content or entire profiles before issuing warnings to users.
There are scenarios where I can understand why this is important; such as removing extremist hate views, soliciting information, promoting illegal activity, pornographic posts, and content considered distressing and graphic for viewers. However, the line of what is considered appropriate and what is considered graphic or pornographic material can be blurred and hard to define.
Instagram Censorship
Recently, Instagram has been fighting the slippery slope of censorship. Its parent company, Facebook, announced that the photo-sharing platform would alter its algorithm to demote content that is considered “inappropriate” or “borderlines” their community standards — not an actual violation. So, while these posts may not be deleted, they will be near impossible to find on the explore tab or hashtag pages.
While this isn’t necessarily ‘killing’ content, it seems that there is a pretty tight gag used on selected profiles. The ‘introduction’ of these features isn’t exactly new to Instagram. Similar censoring was used in 2016, known as ‘shadow banning’. Here, plus-sized influencers began to notice their posts being limited to their followers. This meant that their profiles no longer had an audience reach across the platform through the hashtag search. With the increase of influencer culture, this act can be pretty damaging to someone’s career. Additionally, the platform often lands in hot water when it comes to creating echo chambers through political censoring and alleged right-wing bias.
Despite the company claiming that they were striving to remain as transparent as possible, they failed to define what constitutes ‘inappropriate’ content. However, it doesn’t end there. Upon the removal of a post, the user is notified that the post is deleted as it fails to comply with community standards. Instagram provides no further elaboration as to why the post is removed.
Female nudity on Instagram
Instagram has had an interesting relationship with female nudity in the past. For example, the platform only allows the publishing of female nipples if taken during breastfeeding (although these are still known to be deleted) or mastectomies. Nude artwork is accepted, but only if displayed on sculptures or paintings. Instagram does not have an issue with publishing male nipples on their platform.
Research shows that consumer attitudes vary when it comes to sexually explicit content, so the platform’s response is to delete all possibly controversial content? Professor Katrin Tiidenberg highlights that this is simply the beginning of moves taken by modern companies ‘de-platforming sex’ or better known as the ‘internet war on sex’. We saw this recently with Tumblr completely banning porn and similar adult content, despite it being known as one of the last bastions of online sexual self-expression available.
These inconsistent and unclear standards of content are making Instagram difficult to navigate and use. For example, Sarah Silverman often tests the boundaries of these guidelines by posting comparison pictures of female and male nipples. Silverman posts a series of images, which can be preserved as a male or female body part, baiting the platform to take the image down. Her posts show a clear trend that the male body is deemed acceptable, where the female body is not despite showing the same amount of skin. This is by far my favourite comparison if you wish to check it out (full disclosure this post contains nudity).
These platforms are built on the ideals of personal expression and share these amongst your followers.
“Express yourself by sharing all the moments of your day — the highlights and everything in between too.”
Although I couldn’t bring myself to post a revealing photo of myself online; why should I (or anyone else) be prevented from presenting myself or my body in the way that I wish? While this may not be the intended purpose of the platform, it is ultimately up to the users to use it how they wish. The management is up to the user, each shaped by their own priorities, for them to share niche memes, share complete family albums, accounts for sex workers and animal appreciation profiles.
User control
The way I understand and use the platform is that I follow who I want to follow, so my feed is filled with content that I enjoy seeing. I’m not sure why this isn’t the same for other users. I understand that there is an increasing number of young users on the app today, and measures need to be taken to protect them, but at what cost to the average user? Perhaps the solution is not to censor images but regulate what can be seen by users between 13 and 18 years old.
I recognise that the platform cannot extinguish all of their liability. However, the gagging of women who are simply proud of their bodies and choose to show just as much skin as their male counterparts can, is not okay.
There seems to be little that the user can do to stop or change this. In saying that, I will continue to use the platform to express myself and promote my identity how I see fit and I believe everyone should continue to do the same. Post those terrible drunk selfies, document a day the beach, relive those European adventures and for all my girls out there go ahead and embrace your body by photographing and posting it however you wish — no matter how the platform responds.
