Instagram’s Significant Step Toward Censorship

It is no secret that Facebook and Instagram are not adult-friendly, at all. Because of the visual nature of Instagram, industry accounts owners have been facing a very big challenge over the past months to post content that follows the platform’s rules. Sadly, a large amount of accounts have been shut down without any notice or explanations. Even for our company specializing in social media, it has been almost impossible, in most of the cases, to obtain a real answer or the restoration of the account. Yesterday, owner Mark Zuckerberg’s team expressed in an “integrity announcement”—how the company now wanted to intensify its efforts in removing and reducing the “problematic content." Instagram and Facebook wants to fight “borderline” and “inappropriate content." The issue with “problematic content” is that it’s hard to define and therefore, all “borderline” users are impacted by this lack of clarity in the app's Terms of Service. We understand that “violent, graphic/shocking, sexually suggestive, misinformation and spam posts” are the ones identified as problematic. The company has even been training a new robot to classify and label posts in some of those categories. Although they want to reduce the flow of “inappropriate content," those social media platforms recognize that the borderline posts (memes, humor, sexy…) contribute directly to the popular use of the platform: No doubt that it is what users want to see and end up liking.  This is why they have decided that they won’t necessarily remove the borderline posts that are not clearly violating their rules; instead, those posts will simply and shamefully be demoted. The clear goal expressed by the company is to reduce the exposure and number of views of those “problematic” posts. This new measure will prevent the posts to appear in the Explore page and hashtag searches. Since Facebook has also decided to decrease the visibility of those posts in the feeds, we might also see an impact in the near future on our Instagram timelines if they decide to apply the exact same rule. With approximately 1 billion users, Instagram is the home and sales funnel for many of our industry companies and models. These new rules will obviously have a negative impact on your organic traffic growth (followers and engagement) and sadly contributes to this global puritan censorship that makes our professional and personal lives harder. 7 Veils, the industry leader Social Media Marketing agency, recommends to keep low profile but more important, to maintain business activities on Instagram. Even if it’s impossible to define what is offensive and what is not, the advertising power of the app is too valuable to give up. For more help and details about Instagram marketing strategies, email [email protected]