Instagram’s Content Crackdown is Worse Than You Think

Last week, Meta began to roll out a policy in which users’ Instagram settings default to “limit political content.” This crackdown is troubling beyond the electoral concerns that have already been scrutinized widely — notably, this policy has significant implications for artists and cultural figures.

The app now requires users take six steps to opt in to political content on their recommendation surfaces, which include Reels, Explore, and In-Feed Recommendations. This policy is in accordance with a statement released by Instagram on Feb. 9, which said that the platform would no longer “recommend content about politics.” The implementation of the policy has since drawn criticism from users, who have expressed concerns about this policy limiting users’ access to political content during a year with pivotal elections in the United States and around the world.

“Political content is likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a large group of people and/or society at large,” Instagram defines on their content preferences page.

This nebulous definition — which the company has refused to further clarify — allows for significant discretion on the part of the platform, reducing the potential for public scrutiny and limiting content creators’ capacities to predict if their content will be censored.

Foundational to the artistic tradition is how artists address social topics and phenomena that affect society at large — think Keith Haring, who used his artwork to provide imagery and funding to various AIDS organizations, or Frida Kahlo, whose work concerned the Communist revolutionary movement and Mexico’s indigenous culture.

In fact, some artistic expressions of identity are considered to be inherently political, even without explicit political messaging — including, but not limited to, art expressing Black joy or depicting Palestinian existence. With a policy following such cryptic and opaque guidelines, the public’s exposure to “political” and “social topics” can easily be limited, and these types of identity-focused artworks are therefore at higher risk of censorship. The result is that artists from more marginalized or politicized backgrounds may be more vulnerable to censorship and shadowbanning on social media platforms — merely for existing.

“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,” Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said in a post on Threads about this policy.

But art doesn’t exist to respect the viewer’s appetite for discomfort; art exists to challenge people, to embrace the avant-garde and reject the status quo, to raise questions and start movements. So what happens when artists rely on a privately owned platform like Meta to express themselves?

With billions of people on social media apps, many artists depend on platforms like Instagram to gain traction for their work and disseminate their artistic expression. This policy — with its broad power to censor socially-relevant expression by default — serves as a reminder that these popular platforms are young, their full capacity not yet understood, and they are not necessarily beholden to free speech laws.

This policy should be treated as a warning of the power that large internet platforms hold — both in providing people access to critical information and in stripping it away.

—Staff writer Stella A. Gilbert can be reached at stella.gilbert@thecrimson.com.