Instagram guerrilla war with pornography and users who enter windows when doors are closed in front of them (Part 2)

For the “average” voyeurist, the differences described in the previous part of the article are of little value. After all, the vagina - it is in Africa, the vagina, regardless of whether the latter was photographed and got on the site with a light hand directly to its owner, or is it a porn site that tries to imitate large paid resources and is looking for new members with credit cards. But for all the adamant users with whom I had a chance to communicate, Instagram is not only a means for viewing erotic photos of strangers. For them, this is a way to find "their" people.

19-year-old Andrew told me in Kik communication: “I’m not trying to find“ naked ”on Instagram, I’m mostly looking for contacts at Kik. When I'm not excited, the idea does not appeal to me, but otherwise I just want to conduct erotic correspondence, if I don’t have the opportunity to have sex. ” He laments the “reproduction” of posts that translate users to other porn sites. He prefers real users to them.

Users who post their own photos on Instagram are looking for the same thing as Andrew - asserting themselves and meeting like-minded people.
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“I use Instagram because there are a lot of people here, and they like what we do,” 18-year-old Ree told me in Kik correspondence about the account they created with two friends. "When we started, we had only 3 subscribers, now there are 415". Ree, along with her friends Lily and Yves, decided to create their first Instagram account, although they had previously posted a nude on Tumblr.


When I first came across their account, in the biography section there was a photo of Lily's chest with the following text: “Welcome to our page! Greetings from Lily, Yves and Ree. Just do not send us a personal message, because people are complaining about our page. ” All 29 photos of girls presented were published during the last hour, and three young ladies were depicted to varying degrees naked: in some pictures the girls were half dressed, others were naked, and some were captured by the process of masturbation. If you do not count photos from Ri and Lily laughing on the podium in the gymnasium gymnasium, then there are no faces in any of the photographs.

About 10-15 universal hashtags were assigned to each image, including #eggplantz, #eggplantparm, #eggplantraww, #adule, #seduced and #daddydick. When the account gathered fans in the blink of an eye, the girls made sure that their trick, used to avoid getting caught on Instagram radars and quietly developing their fan base, works great. The girls later updated their personal information page, where they indicated that their account would be public only for three minutes daily. They also begged that users who accidentally bumped into their page would better block it than contact Instagram.

“This is annoying,” Ri complained about posts that were deleted without warning. “If you don’t like nudity, then don’t click this hashtag, don’t go to this page.”

Her precautions and disappointments are not uncommon. Most of the nudity accounts that I’ve viewed on Instagram contain similar language that appeals to community members to spare them. And although here you will not find such a hype that has unfolded over #freethenipple, but one cannot deny that this is the real meaning of protecting the community, the general struggle against all that amateur pornographers consider unnecessary censorship carried out by a despotic technological lord.



But the question remains: why aren't they joining the much more loyal Reddit and Tumblr communities or the newer porn-only platforms, such as Uplust or Pinsex, that will embrace them with open arms?

“If you don’t like nudity, then don’t click this hashtag, don’t go to this page.”

The irony is this: in spite of modern technologies of fighting “obscene” content on Instagram, for those who share nakedness, this platform is more attractive than other more loyal corners of the Internet, precisely because of its technical power.

Reddit and Tumblr provide access from mobile phones, but posting photos from smartphones is much more laborious than from a laptop (as Ree and her friends have made sure). The process of creating a photo is much simpler on Instagram - it took aim, photographed it, posted it. In addition, Instagram and Kik can be installed on the same device, which is always at hand with the user.

Ramon, a 28-year-old young man from Rhode Island with a particularly impressive penis, says that Instagram has deleted his photo many times and banned his accounts. And yet, he registers again under different names. “All you need to open an account is an email address. It's simple. I do this when I'm bored, ”he says.

These simple reasons become clear when you think about how much Instagram users are under 30 years old. 53 percent of people using the platform, as of 2014, were between the ages of 18 and 29. 56 percent of all teenagers in America use Instagram, and 91 percent get on the Internet from mobile devices. And, as it turned out, a lot of these teenagers love to share nudity. I felt this fact in my own skin when a 14-year-old offspring unexpectedly sent me a direct message with a photo of my member from my personal Instagram account, previously filled with "dressed" pictures of a young man surrounded by his family and friends. Click on any photo from the numerous army of members and breasts, available on the platform under the appropriate hashtags, and make sure that it is not such a rare thing to see in the biography a proud message that this user is 16-17 years old, and he is looking for his peers- like-minded people. Even the most hardcore hashtags will lead you to the crowds of teenagers, so avoiding their naked flesh has become a truly Herculean task in order to prevent the line between the reporter and the baby photographer from blurring.

“Instagram is the most popular teen app after Facebook,” says reporter Amanda Hess, who regularly writes about Internet culture, teens and sexuality (and who, with a sense of duty, studied the nature of Eggplant Friday for Slate magazine) . “People want to share photos of erotic content or view them in places where they are already registered. They do not want to install for this some kind of special porn application. "

However, she considers the convenience of using the Instagram platform as the main reason that teenagers publish their nude photos there. Instagram's privacy settings are “much more intuitive than on Facebook,” says Hass. - Facebook has thousands of privacy settings, they are constantly changing, and you are not sure which photos unfamiliar users can view. Instagram is just closed or open. ” And, unlike Facebook, Instagram protects anonymity. “You can create a username that your parents don’t know about, and you don’t have to add a grandparent, a crowd of cousins ​​and mom’s boss to your friends.”


Of course, when it comes to sexual interaction, the issue of voluntariness is fundamental, but the situation becomes much more ambiguous when it comes to minors. During the investigation of the case of a “gang of teenage sexters” in Virginia, in an interview for The Atlantic magazine, Hannah Rosin (Hannah Rosin) noted that the distribution of the “nudity”, even of her own free will, of people depicted in the photo, can have serious consequences. According to the deputy sheriff of Louise County in Virginia, “storing or distributing photos of naked people under the age of majority — even if it’s their own photo — can result in criminal prosecution in accordance with state laws on child pornography.” Katie Notopolous from the BuzzFeed news portal faced the same problems trying to find out the reasons for the unexpected deluge from photos of members flooding her Snapchat, often sent by teenagers. (The best consolation BuzzFeed could find for her is that in the end she, "most likely", will escape prison).

However, exchanging “nakedness” is a mutually desirable form of communication for them and helps to know the sexual aspect of human life. By sharing their nude photos in apps like Instagram, teens can beneficially explore and develop their sexual identity. And, regardless of age, this can be a startlingly liberating practice.

And if earlier I had to drink something stronger and take breaks every 20 minutes while I was making my way through the archives of porno kontentent Instagram, now I gracefully flit among tons of content. And despite the fact that many photos are indisputably sexy, they are no longer something shameful to me, which I used to frantically delete from my Instagram history. Even as a voyeurist, I now felt so clearly part of the group that I deliberately did not publish all the hashtags used by users, fearing to harm this cohesive community.

Again, given the persistence of users such as Rea and Ramon, I am not very worried about this. And while Instagram continues the “mopping up” of porno-tag tags with increasing ferocity, targeted users are more creative. (Here are the hot tags of this week that will inevitably disappear by the time you read this article (like all the hashtags mentioned above except one): #aaaasssss, #seducee, #becauseboobs, #freakshit.

Although these porn lovers could not have any connection with politics, human rights advocates of free speech and big nude fans could learn from the Instagram community of his quiet refusal to capitulate. Regardless of the political preferences of users, people like Rea and Ramon are living examples of how to skillfully send (and away) censorship and restrictions on sexual freedom. Instagram is now at a crossroads, and if you look closer, the service has already stepped with one foot on the wrong path of development. And this fact can make the service officially surrender to the battle, which he has already lost.

Currently, Ramon intends to again and again return to Instagram, even if for this he will have to constantly create new accounts. It may be apolitical, but it calls for the distinction and interpretation of concepts when it comes to the fact that pornography is rated by Instagram as something that has negative “value to the end user”.

"Thousands of the same hashtags say that you are not the only one who enjoy porn," he says.