A purge is afoot: Instagram keeps deleting porn stars’ accounts.
The advent of social media has evolved beyond your favourite films, sappy quotes and plates of food. For those in the pornography industry, it’s an invaluable tool.
Particularly Instagram, the perfect place for adult stars to showcase soft-core photos and establish a brand – however, hundreds of accounts keep getting deleted. ‘They discriminate against us because they don’t like what we do for a living.’
That’s the view of Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performers Actors Guild, who’s leading the fight on those campaigning against porn stars.
Despite their accounts not showing any nudity or sex, Evans’ group has collected 1,300 performers who say Instagram’s content moderators deleted their accounts for violations of the site’s community standards.
While campaigners met with Instagram representatives earlier this summer, bidding to set up a more comprehensive appeal process, the talks soon halted. In the months following, accounts have continued to be deleted.
Evans told BBC News: ‘I should be able to model my Instagram account on Sharon Stone or any other verified profile, but the reality is that doing that would get me deleted.’
A watershed moment for Evans came after the death of porn star Jessica Jaymes in September this year – when her account with more than 900,000 followers was removed soon after. Evans said: ‘When I saw that Jessica’s account was deleted, my heart sunk. It was the last straw.’
Fortunately, the account was eventually reinstated – however, not all porn stars are receiving the same privilege.
Ginger Banks, an adult performer and sex workers’ rights activist, was targeted as part of a 2018 campaign to report as many adult performers’ accounts as possible (with one particularly prolific user, Omid, spearheading the reports). Instagram followings are often considered in the industry when casting – so when accounts are lost, so are the fans and business connections they made along the way.
Banks said:
When you put time and effort into building an account with over 300,000 followers and it gets deleted, that makes you feel defeated. Even if you’re following the rules, you still have your account deleted. And that’s the part that’s frustrating.
The people reporting us don’t understand that people’s incomes are affected, or they don’t care. They think that we shouldn’t be doing this job or it shouldn’t exist.
I’ve never posted explicit images on Instagram. But even a picture of me wearing leggings could be extremely provocative to someone, and worthy of being reported. We’re letting these businesses determine what is art and what is pornography, and then punish us.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement to BBC News they have to ‘put rules in place around nudity and sexual solicitation to ensure content is appropriate for everyone, particularly young people’.
The statement added: ‘We will take action on content reported to us if it breaks these rules. We give people the opportunity to appeal the decision and will reinstate content if we mistakenly remove something.’
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.