Instagram. Tama Leaver

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Instagram - Tama Leaver

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the first known emoji hashtag to be (temporarily) banned from Instagram searches, in large part due to the use of the hashtag to playfully indicate male genitals (Highfield 2018). In many ways, the increased privacy that direct messages and self-deleting stories offer may also provide new avenues for the sharing of nudity, pornography and other material that is simply not publicly visible and thus never flagged by users who see this as problematic. Instagram’s algorithms similarly appear to do a much better job at automatically detecting nudity and pornography and removing it than other banned content (either directly, or triggering review by moderators) but even then the algorithms can be foiled by low resolution images and other visual elements that distort the digital footprint of nudity to fool an algorithm, but which is still clearly and obviously nudity to (human) viewers.

      Figure 1.2. Screenshot of health warning returned with Instagram #bonespo search

      Content moderation is such a complex sociotechnical undertaking that, all things considered, it’s amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. Even so, as a society we have once again handed over to private companies the power to set and enforce the boundaries of appropriate public speech for us. That is enormous cultural power held by a few deeply invested stakeholders, and it is being done behind closed doors, making it difficult for anyone else to inspect or challenge.

      Instagram’s insistence on describing their more than a billion users as a singular community, with one set of rules to govern that entire community, means that the diversity of users and specific contexts of communication and content sharing are often lost. While chapter 5 outlines some of the very diverse communities that flourish and connect on Instagram, the boundaries established by Instagram’s content moderation and removal policies mean that other groups and other communities have either dived deeper into Instagram, beyond hashtags and public accounts, or have moved to other visual social media platforms altogether.

      Communication scholar Oren Soffer (2016) argues that Snapchat’s ephemerality is ‘the counter-logic of new media information aggregation’. For Soffer, ephemeral applications return to an oral paradigm of communication, where the visual is now a disappearing utterance (thus more oral than textual in nature). This inability to store and archive the message (or ‘Snap’) changes the nature of the communication process. Or, as Professor of Digital Culture Jill Walker Rettberg (2018, p. 192) succinctly puts it, ‘Snapchat is a conversation, not an archive.’ Equally important, the ephemeral nature of this conversation means that more users tend to pay more focused attention to these exchanges as they know they’re unable to return to them (Bayer et al. 2016). Thus, in Snapchat, Instagram had a competitor that was capturing both the conversation, and attention, of one of their most prized demographic groups.

      By 2017, the growth of Stories on Instagram was the biggest driver for Instagram’s overall success. The leaner Stories format was quickly expanded, to include options for Live Video, the inclusion of a range of filters – including the very prominent face filters popularized by Snapchat – as well as a range of other creative tools, including ‘stickers’ for text, for polls, for asking followers questions, and many other things. By the first anniversary of Stories on Instagram, there were 250 million Instagram users using Stories every single day, a number which was more than the total number of users on Snapchat at the same time. While Instagram did not, and did not claim to, invent the Stories format, the platform quickly became the most popular home for Stories. At the same time, the ephemeral, disappearing nature of Stories was dulled somewhat with the appearance of Stories Highlights, where users could gather a collection of themed Story segments and prominently display them on their main profile. Here, the balance between the ephemerality of communication and the performativity of the main Instagram profile seemingly allowed the best of both worlds for Instagram.

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