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What the Experts Say II

Social media is an open forum where everyone can be creative and permits us to be heard. It provides certain individuals the opportunity to reach wider audiences, crating an online community and space for a discussion. Instagram is well-known social media for sharing pictures and thoughts and its main concern is to have users post appropriate content which does not violate its norms. The common idea is that you should not post a picture which you would not show to your children, boss or parents. This includes nudity or mature content and violence. However, there are different degrees of censorship to control the portrayal of male and female bodies. For instance, “King of Instagram” Dan Bilzerian, with over 16,4 million followers, usually posts photos of women, guns and trips to Vegas. Photos of Kim Kardashian West’s bottom are allowed to stay, while female nipples or other bare body parts which do not belong to her or other famous people are considered to be inappropriate and taken down. There are examples of people who tried to show normal body functions or body images. Canadian photographer and fashion designer, Petra Collins, uploaded a photo of herself that showed her pubic hair emerging from bikini bottoms. The photo did not show any signs of nudity nor did it break any of Instagram’s terms and conditions yet was deleted by Instagram. Petra thinks it was deleted because it simply did not meet society’s standards of feminity. Rupi Kaur, Canadian poet and artist, posted a picture of herself fully clothed but with a spot of blood between her legs and on the sheets. Instagram removed it twice, claiming that the photo violated their norms. Kaur says that “it is okay to sell what’s between a woman’s legs, more than it is okay to mention its inner workings.” After Kaur posted the whole story on Facebook and it was liked and shared by thousands of people, her post suddenly reappeared on her Instagram profile. It is surprising, however, that Instagram claims to prohibit images that are “violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive”, yet examples of these two harmless pictures were taken down. Standards of nudity between genders are far from equal in many countries but it is shocking that Instagram, which claims to be a platform for expressing ourselves, deletes posts just because they do not fit society’s expectations (Faust, 2017).

 Watch Rupi Kaur's explanation in the video below:



References:
Faust, G. (2017). Hair, Blood and the Nipple: Instagram Censorship and the Female Body. In Frömming U., Köhn S., Fox S., & Terry M. (Eds.), Digital Environments: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces (pp. 159-170). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxrxw.14


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