Instagram Censorship: Why Artists Still Can’t Leave Meta

This week, I managed to be both fascinated and disappointed.

While searching for an interesting topic for my newsletter (so I wouldn’t have to write about Donald Trump again), I came across an article about someone very close to Trump — someone almost every artist is familiar with:
Mark Zuckerberg.

His Instagram is both a source of opportunity and frustration for artists.
In the article, the author — an artist herself — ironically reflects on the struggle of surviving as an artist under the strict rules of social media, where nudity can still be censored even when it’s art.

(It’s a shame Mark has learned how to detect female nipples but still can’t fight spam — check your Instagram spam folder and you’ll probably find a message from Booking.com.)

Offering a witty and playful take on how affecting our strangely intimate relationship with social media can be, the London-based internet performance artist Harriet Richardson has created an ongoing series of works that cast Mark Zuckerberg, founding CEO of Facebook and Meta, as a wayward boyfriend.

The article was an interesting read and a valuable experience, but my heart broke at one particular moment near the end.

The idea began as a response to a policy for censoring nudity on Instagram, a social media platform also owned by Meta, which has long impacted artists who rely on the platform to share their work. According to the guidelines, nipples need only be concealed when they are on women’s bodies.

While exceptions for art were written into Instagram’s policy, its definition proved subjective and many artists have had their posts removed or even their accounts deleted for violating the rules.

At first, I thought the villain of the story was Zuckerberg.
After reading this quote, I thought it was the artist.
Though Richardson has joined alternative platforms like Bluesky and Substack, she still uses Meta to share her work because of its much larger user base.
WTF!?
BI*CH!

But by the very end, I realised the real villain was journalism itself.

I spent my time getting invested in a character I admired, only to discover in the final lines that she wasn’t really escaping the thing she was fighting against.

And that’s the problem with artists on social media.

We complain about platforms.
We complain about Instagram censorship.
We complain about algorithms, Meta, reach, nudity rules and how impossible it is to build an audience without playing by someone else’s rules.
But then we stay.

Because the audience is already there.
There’s no point in being part of a community that rejects outdated practices if you’re not willing to do the same yourself.

There’s no point in cutting off the branch you’re sitting on.

P.S.
I refuse to use Facebook after the 2016 elections.
I refuse to use Telegram because Durov promised it would always be ad-free — and now it’s full of ads.
Lol.
I don’t use Bluesky because of its connection to Jack Dorsey. I’ve always been skeptical of him and his projects — if you’ve read about how Twitter was built, you’ll probably understand why.

And I’m not going to use a platform simply because it’s full of people who don’t want to start building from scratch.

They just want somewhere else to sell their work.
No matter how.
No matter where.
No matter when.

...your worst artist and best friend,

hEhe and my contemporary art criticism