Generally I have not been on the Twitter dot com, but I did look at it briefly yesterday on account of someone sent me a message and saw the tweet of a stranger complaining about Instagram, as yet another victim of Instagram's robot algorithm deleting someone's account for violation of their wildly conservative terms of service (which include "emoji strings" that Instagram finds salacious). They're wildly obnoxious and I deleted my account last year shortly after the uproar about the TOS.
The thing about Instagram is, they do not give a flying fuck about you, your art, your followers. You are probably never going to talk to an Actual Human about whether or not your account is truly violating the TOS, and in other news, unless you have Actually Read the current TOS and not gotten your information from someone's Instagram story, your account probably is violating their TOS, because the TOS has become increasingly more restrictive over the years. And if your account is not Actually Violating the TOS, again, there is no person who does that. It is all robots, or whatever, programmed to look for whatever they can parse as nudity, and they will take it down. This even happened to models I followed with millions of followers, and it happens to some and not others, and yes it is frustrating! But Instagram doesn't care. And y'all should leave. Tell your followers that Instagram is not a good platform for you and you have a blog now, or if Instagram is wildly important to your following then post a teaser image that people have to then visit your blog to see. If you are popular and have a lot of friends then organize! Get your friends together and make a little webring and y'all can get a bunch of people to delete Instagram on one day, which is what everyone should've done when they came out with the TOS shit. Mass deletion of accounts MIGHT make Instagram pay attention but I Doubt It. If you are going to stay on Instagram, you should actually read the TOS so that you're not in danger of having your account deleted, and pay attention to what they're looking for so that you're not giving them something new to look for. What do I mean by that? Well, Instagram checks your captions as well as your photos. I have had photos removed for the caption "Send nudes", even though my photo was not nude, because "send nudes" is a sexual solicitation and violates the TOS. This is similar to models linking to their OnlyFans - Instagram considers it solicitation of sexual services. People tend to solve this by making a code word like spelling OnlyFans "0nlyFan$", or rhyming like "OnlyCrayons", and so on. As a Gen X-er who also swerves around rules, I approve of the method. However, it's a temporary fix as the algorithm will eventually pick this up and start flagging those as well. Don't contribute neologisms to their algorithm just so Instagram can find you and delete your account. It's a lose-lose situation for a lot of people & I was never popular enough on Instagram to rally people around my cause, but I hate to see people struggle with this when they could take their data and go. Take your data and go! Tell your friends! Stake out your own corner of the internet where no one will delete your work because you posted "eggplant emoji, three drops of water emoji, tongue emoji"! You will not miss it.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
February 2024
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