Ross

NAME: Ross
CENSORSHIP: Shadow, content and account ban

What reason was given for your ban?

Nudity, I guess. Solicitation of sex. The list is long, and wild, and makes no sense.

Why do you think your post(s) was censored?

Because I’m a fag.

Were you able to appeal and what was the response?

Yes, most of the time, nothing happens. It just says “Thank you for your response.” and the post is gone.

What effect has your experience of censorship had on you?

I haven’t had a place to share a lot of my work with the public, other than my site. It’s also hard to direct people to my site if I can’t talk about or share the work on IG, where I have the largest following. I have had the same amount of followers for so many years. I have spoken on my IG about this how strange that is, almost unlikely if you will. I think I’ve been shadow-banned for years and have seen how it’s affected my engagement, follower numbers, etc. I have been put on the naughty list, and it really hurts the potential for “organic” engagement on my IG, which in turn affects my potential for work, jobs, collaborations, etc. It sucks. The work that is flagged and pulled usually shows too much body hair or something like that. It’s all biased and feels so homophobic.

What’s one thing you want people to know about this topic?

IG ain’t it. We need something new. Who will take us to the next platform?

This is a call for web developers and creators. Bring us to the next myspace. FB owns IG, that pretty much says it all. Zuck and everything that comes from it is a monster. At this point, we all give so much time and energy to this platform that wants nothing more than to take from us, extract our data, count our screen taps, to sell it back to us. We don’t even see the people we follow anymore!