#Pornocalypse Comes To Instagram: XBIZ Explains It All

Instagram is not a service that I use, nor one that I would normally cover on ErosBlog. It’s always been a #pornocalypse social media platform, like Facebook, with adult-unfriendly, porn-hostile terms of service (TOS). My whole pornocalypse shtick is that it eventually “comes for us all” — by which I mean that every porn-friendly social-media service eventually changes the rules and throws all us stinky-porn adult-industry people out. But how can it be the pornocalypse if we were never welcome? How can it be the pornocalypse if the TOS always said our stuff shouldn’t be there in the first place?

In the case of Instagram, though…

Instagram was something of a hybrid. They weren’t porn-friendly, but they used to allow quite a lot of risque material. The TOS were vaguely disapproving, but in actual practice you could get away with quite a lot. I never bothered, because I hate getting thrown out of places and not being able to bitch because I was technically never welcome in the first place. But lots of adult performers and sex industry people went hog-wild and built businesses and public followings on the platform.

Of course it had to end in tears. The #pornocalypse comes for us all. I’m not in a position to talk about the details because I was never on the platform. But Gustavo Turner at XBIZ has written a ludicrously detailed, thoroughly excellent piece of investigative reporting. Incredibly, he’s gotten way more detail out of Facebook and Instagram spokespeople than you would expect. Pay particular attention to the interplay between their comments, their denials, and their “no comments” — the picture painted by the differences is very telling.

The article is Instagram and the War On Porn: An XBIZ Explainer. It’s long, it’s good, it’s worth your time. It’s better than anything I’ve ever written on this stuff, and I’m proud of my coverage over the years. But I am not a journalist; I can’t get these people to talk to me, even when I try, which is not often. Gustavo is, and he can.

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Why Can’t You Search For Eggplants On Instagram? #Pornocalypse!

This article in Talking Points Memo goes into impressive detail on how Instagram is fighting its #Pornocalypse war on nudity. As quick as they ban a salacious hashtag, the users switch to a new and more innocuous-sounding one:

It’s not just penises that are taking Instagram’s backchannels by storm, it’s all manners of sexy bits: 15-second jerkoff videos, exposed anuses, a bevy of braless breasts–the latter of which are sometimes part of a highly politicized battle to “Free the Nipple” on the photo-sharing app. Though nudity is banned by Instagram’s community guidelines, a cottage industry of illicit hashtags has sprung up to find and share these photos, everything from the more mundanely-phrased #seduced and #exposed for broad nudity, to the community-specific tags such as #femdomme and #daddydick, intended more for kink. And that’s saying nothing of the droves of cleverly-punned tags such as #eggplantparm, which may turn you off Italian food for quite some time. These naked photos are so ubiquitous that I’ve yet to search a kink that hasn’t pulled up at least a few steamy selfies.

But as many porn hashtags as there are, many more have been quietly erased by Instagram, revealing nothing when you search for them. Pop in #sex and you’re told “No posts found.” Ditto #adult, #stripper, #vagina, #penis, #cleavage. Even the Internet’s ultimate innuendo, the eggplant, wasn’t safe. You can still tag your posts with banned hashtags and emojis, but good luck finding your community within. Typo-laden tags have popped up to accommodate these arbitrary bans: #boobs is gone, but as I write this, #boobss has well over 600,000 posts; #adult’s spinoff #adule is quickly closing in on 100,000. The tag for #seduce may now be useless, but variants like #seduced and #seductivsaturday cropped up in its place–though it’s worth noting that in the weeks since I’ve been writing this article, #seductiv, the tag that brought me into this world to begin with, has vanished entirely, as has #boobss, #adule, and #eggplantparm, after BuzzFeed caught wind of the fact that the eggplant emoji was not searchable on the app.

In addition to playing hashtag Whack-a-Mole, Instagram apparently plays post Whack-a-Mole and account Whack-a-Mole. But all you need for a new account is a new email:

Ramon, a 28-year-old from Rhode Island with a particularly impressive penis, says he’s had both photos pulled and profiles banned by Instagram, and yet has rejoined under various handles several times. “All you need is an email [address] and you open an account. It’s simple,” he says. “I’ll do it when I’m bored.”

Pornocalypse, of course, is baked in Instagram’s very bones; they have never been nudity friendly.

Instagram’s puritanical and often gender-biased stance towards stark nudity and the more nebulous moral boundaries it imposes on its members is nothing new. Since their launch in 2010, the app, which is open to use for anyone aged 13 and above with a valid email account, has been constantly battling the problem of how to keep the community as open as possible while also protecting its members from things deemed unsavory, like naked body parts.

It’s a long article with a lot more in it. Worth your time!