Instagram’s frequent shadow banning and removal of performers and artists’ profiles has major repercussions.
Photo: Solen Feyissa / Unsplash

As a new performer on the burlesque scene, I recently took an online class on business practices with New Orleans based performer and producer Trixie Minx. We covered the basics – finances, approaching producers, promotion, etc. During the presentation on social media marketing, I was taken aback when she urged attendees to make a website for their business due to the risk of social media accounts, mainly Instagram, being subject to blocking, removal and shadow banning. Blocking, removals, shadow banning? Wow, those are some pretty stringent punishments for harmless social media posting. I couldn’t help but wonder…what is the impact of online shadow banning on performers and artists working in sex work adjacent industries?

Shadow banning, the most elusive and misunderstood of the punishments mentioned earlier, has become ubiquitous in today’s Zeitgeist, a zinger of a buzz word. But what does shadow banning actually entail?

A New York Times article from earlier this year defines it as “stealth actions by social media platforms to limit a post’s visibility”. Another definition, this time from the Huffington Post, states that shadow banning “can mean your public posts on a given platform are only visible to you and your followers, restricting your ability to reach new people and grow your account.” Another tell tale sign of shadow banning is a noticeable drop in story and post engagement. So what kind of content is usually subject?

META, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, states on their transparency center that it prohibits content that includes “Explicit sexual solicitation by, including but not limited to the following, offering or asking for…Nude photos/videos/imagery/sexual fetish items” and “Pornographic activities, strip club shows, live sex performances or erotic dances”. But what constitutes nude imagery and what can be deemed erotic? All of these terms are arbitrary, completely up to our own interpretation, especially as we enter another heated debate around Instagram’s policy on nipple censorship. Questions of body representation, sex education and free speech are intertwined as performers and artists are targeted for their online activity. In a 2020 Dazed article, sex workers also noted that sometimes the issue isn’t the content - it’s their identity as sex workers.

Carolina Are, a pole dancing instructor and social media researcher, conducted a study in 2021 (The Shadowban Cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on Instagram) on the shadow bans experienced by pole dancers on Instagram. She writes that through shadow banning, “if a post is sexually suggestive, but doesn’t depict a sex act, it may not appear in Explore or hashtag pages, seriously impacting creators’ ability to gain new audiences”. The passing of the FOSTA/SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) in 2018 in the United States has been regarded as a major reason behind the increasing difficulty for both sex workers and those working in adjacent fields to openly use social media to promote and organize their work. Are states that this has led to the suppression of “sex work related content, even when it is not sexually explicit, conflating sex work with trafficking” and “promotes the view of sex and sexuality as risky and harmful”.

Instagram’s frequent shadow banning of pole dancers has been the subject of a study conducted by Carolina Are.
Photo by Timur Garifov / Unsplash

Alma Adore, an Oslo-based stripper and striptease artist, tells me via Instagram DM that she is “very much shadowbanned lol. Just people not finding me unless typing my handle”. She continues, saying that “in terms of community engagement I probably am losing followers based on the fact that it’s not that easy to search for me if you don’t know my handle. So I am very dependent on my use of business cards to make sure people can find my socials”. To prove this point further, I wasn’t even able to link her Instagram profile in this article – the link shows up as broken even though her profile very much exists.

Some creators are paying even more attention to the hashtags and audience control settings at their disposal.

One erotic visual artist I was in contact with, who requested for anonymity, writes that they “made sure to use age restriction on [their] account, and avoided using very general hashtags or using hashtags at all that could lead to more viewing from a ‘general’ audience, which, while they can become followers, many of [them] will just report your posts instead of just scrolling away.”

The impact of this constant content suppression and censorship on the platform has been a source of both a loss of visibility and income for creators. The artist says that “It’s really stressful when something does get taken down because it works [on] a strike basis that’s really unfair. I contested all of [them] and only works about half the time to bring [them] back”. Within the performance community, it’s now commonplace for many performers and creators to set up back up accounts in case their primary ones are deleted or restricted in any way. Years of building up both a digital portfolio and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of followers leads to bookings and gigs. Money. Losing all that due to arbitrary censorship rules on an app that sometimes doesn’t even notify the account holder of this “wrongdoing” is a major hindrance to performers and artists’ careers.

Interestingly enough, Are’s study points out that celebrities and high profile people are not at risk for this soft-style censorship, arguing that “hyper-sexualised social media posts by celebrities [are] often promoted by platforms”. This double standard therefore punishes smaller creators, such as herself, as she writes that through Instagram she’s become “visible in ways that require physical efforts and digital labour spread across years spent building a platform on social media” and that it “is both a work resource and a tool for my own expression, a situation many fellow pole dancers and sex workers resonated with and found themselves in.” As shadow bans continue to impact performers and artists on the platform, the only options are to have several digital contingency / backup accounts on various platforms in order to ensure their presence and therefore business survival.

In the shadows - Instagram's crackdown on performers and artists