After Instagram's weeklong ban on #curvy, the hashtag is now kosher again. When the prohibition on the body-positive tag went into effect, some users sidestepped it by using fill-ins like #stillcurvy and #bringcurvyback instead.
"This wasn't curvy pornography, this was just irrelevant pornography," Instagram's director of public policy, Nicky Jackson Colaco, told theWashington Post. Instagram removes a few tags daily when they become problematic, according to Jackson Colaco. The site will apparently now curate all things #curvy, particularly the images that get the most exposure, such as "most recent" posts and "top posts."
"In this case, #curvy was consistently being used to share content that violates our guidelines around nudity," an Instagram representative told Re/code about why the tag was suspended. Sexually explicit hashtags, ranging from those that cite specific body parts to, say, #dildo, haven't been prohibited because users searching for those terms are probably prepared for what kind of imagery will pop up, so Instagram is bound to get fewer reports on the smutty shots (and reports are what lead to banned hashtags).
Though Instagram has placed "Content Advisory" warnings on tags like #ana (though you can look at #thinspirational sans any kind of warning), it's pretty telling that a body-positive tag like #curvy got banished. Which hashtags will get the boot next?
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