If you visited any of these five art institutions in Manhattan yesterday, June 15, you may have walked away with a flyer and a black sticker that read “Don’t Delete Art.” Between 11 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., a group of four organizers handed out fliers at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Parsons School of Design, the Magnum Foundation, the New Museum and the International Center of Photography Museum, informing passers-by of their frustration in the face of art censorship. on social networks. The day-long action culminated at Meta’s headquarters in Noho, where activists hoped to hand-deliver a manifesto and petition signed by 2,172 people to a representative from the company, Instagram’s parent organization and from Facebook.

The demonstration was led by the organizers of Don’t delete the art (DDA), a campaign whose manifest calls on social media companies to reconsider their existing restrictions on artistic content, review alleged violations, and improve their appeals and notification process.

Over the past few years, artists have called Instagram explicit censorship of their work and “shadow ban” from their accounts. “Shadow banning” refers to when the platform effectively hides an account by removing it from search results, the explore page, personal feeds, and recommended account suggestions. Since December, users can see when their posts are not recommended for non-subscribers, but Elizabeth Larison explained that additional restrictions may vary on a case-by-case basis. Many of these cases stem from alleged violations of the company’s complicated rules regarding nudity depictions.

“These things are really important for artists who are unrepresented or who live in places where there’s a lot of censorship in general,” Larison said. Hyperallergic outside the New Museum. Larison is one of DDA’s principal organizers and serves as Director of the Arts and Culture Advocacy Program at National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), a non-profit organization created by ACLU members in the 1970s that works with activists, librarians, teachers, curators and other cultural workers to prevent the silence of artistic works and literary.

Meta did not respond to Hyperallergic request for comment for this story.

DDA was launched in 2020. In addition to its campaigning efforts, the organization, which is funded by the NCAC, teaches artists how to post images to avoid being reported and how to appeal alleged violations of Instagram’s Community Guidelines. DDA also offers an online service Gallery censored work. The organization is currently run by NCAC workers, Login Artists at Risk, a PEN America affiliate that champions freedom of expression; And Freemuse, another organization that centers artistic freedom. Three artists are also curators of DDA: Savannah Spirit, Spencer Tunick and Emma Shapiro, a Hyperallergic contributor who also serves as the project’s editor.

These artists attended Thursday’s rally and spoke with Hyperallergic on their long history with censorship on Instagram.

Spirit first encountered the problem around 2014, a few years after Meta bought Instagram in 2012. The artist was posting a series of pin-ups. spirit account was taken down several times, at one point eliminating its audience of over 5,000 subscribers. She thinks she missed out on potential exposure to the art world and around $10,000 in direct sales. After her pin-up streak was flagged, Spirit devised a strategy to circumvent the company’s algorithm: she now creates nude photographs in filtered light patterns. Shadows from blinds and lace curtains can trick the algorithm into missing a naked body; it’s a forced censorship measure that Spirit says actually improved his art.

Tunic photography often presents naked bodies posed in urban settings. He captures these images in the early morning. His account has been shadowbanned, but Tunick is unable to access the part of the app that shows him the status of his account.

Shapiro says his account was also pushed into the “not recommended” group, and the artist witnessed his posts being massively deleted.

“I use my own body in my artwork,” Shapiro said Hyperallergic, adding that it is his main tool. She thinks Instagram’s limitations could affect her ability to secure artist residencies. residence.

“It’s like it never happened,” Shapiro said of the work she created during these programs. “And that really worries me. I’m afraid this will affect their future decisions for artists like me.

The artistic practices of Spirit, Tunick and Shapiro all share a common motif: nudity. instagram explicitly allows naked bodies in paintings and sculptures (Meta also allow nudity in “other art”), but the lines fade for photography and artwork that looks too realistic. Nipples emerged as a particular point of contention: Instagram allows male nipples but prohibits female nipples in general, though it does allow female nipples in the context of “breastfeeding, childbirth, and times after childbirth.” childbirth, health-related situations (for example, post-mastectomy, breast cancer awareness, or gender-confirmation surgery) or an act of protest.

Critics have pointed to these blatantly gendered rules for years. In 2014, artist Micol Hebron created the “male nipple paste,” a digital sticker that Instagram users could place on female nipples in their posts. Shapiro, who joined DDA in 2021, started a conceptually similar initiative in 2017 titled “Exposure therapy” – a collection of physical stickers displaying photographs of female nipples. Exposure Therapy instagram (which has been deleted twice) shows the stickers in the world – stuck to utility poles and graffitied walls and hung on beaches and restaurant tables. They are often accompanied by another sticker that reads “Nudity is not pornography”.

Works are often flagged by Instagram’s algorithm, a process that is far from impartial. A Guardian A survey published in February found that AI ranks women’s bodies as more sexually suggestive than men’s.

Further complications arise over Meta’s clause against “sexual solicitation”. In a 2022 article for Hyperallergic, Shapiro reported that some artists accused of violating the “solicitation” rule were moving their content to PornHub and Onlyfans.

“Sex is not the subject of my works, I only use a naked body,” Shapiro said at yesterday’s action as she unfurled outside the International Center of Photography, which was quiet on a sunny midweek afternoon. “So I was always very offended that my body was sexualized without my intention.”

In 2022, the supervisory board of Meta – the independent third party but funded by Meta – ruled that the company should reverse two decisions to remove photographs of a transgender person’s bare chest, indicating that the rules about female nipples are “extensive and confusing, especially when applied to transgender and non-binary people”. (meta explain its rules in a response to the advice: the benefits vary depending on whether a person has undergone a male-to-female or female-to-male transition, if the person has had superior surgery and if there are scars on someone’s nipples a.) The Oblivion Council also requested changes to the solicitation policy.

DDA organizers said Meta has not issued a decision in response to the council’s recommendations, and no public statement appears available online.

DDA organizers say they had an ongoing relationship with Meta, but contact has been limited in recent months. On Thursday, the group arrived at the company’s unmarked offices in Manhattan with a banker’s box filled with information about DDA, printouts from the gallery, as well as the manifesto and petition. The group spoke with security guards outside before Larison and Spirit entered the lobby of the building. They returned five minutes later with the box still in their arms: a staff member told them they should contact “press@meta.com” or send the documents.

While advocacy efforts for free speech online often focus on nudity, the consequences of social media censorship and shadow bans extend far beyond the scope of bodies. nudes and even art. A 2021 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that elsewhere on the Internet, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter inconsistently enforce their rules, often avoiding politically sensitive topics and disproportionately censoring content created by non-white communities, especially if that content was created in another language. Specific cases emerge from time to time: a artwork which said “ACAB” and “defund the police”; posts in India about COVID-19; and voices speaking of political unrest in Colombia and Palestine would have been suppressed. Meta dismissed these incidents as “technical issuesrelated to locations rather than content.

But for Larison, this explanation is a pretext that overlooks the potential of technology.

“Algorithms can do so much detailed stuff, they can learn so much about us,” Larison said. “There should be more algorithm training and artistic perspectives need to be brought to the content moderation process.” The four organizers stressed that Thursday’s action was part of a larger ongoing campaign and that the attempted delivery of the box to Meta is just the start.

“This campaign will continue,” Larison said. “We need the artistic community to join us.”