Thread by @fakedanshusband

Early last year, Instagram started banning certain hashtags. #fetish #rubber #leather #kinky #sexpositive, etc., were suddenly targets for censorship. Kinksters, sex workers, sex educators, leather men, rubber drones started falling away. Accounts getting deleted.

Not for explicitly sexual content. Not for anything that violated @Instagram’s terms of service. But for thinking we should be allowed to be who were are online—and on @Instagram—in the say way straight and vanilla people are allowed to be themselves.

Once again, look at my deleted photos: 3 of them were deleted for “sexual activity." There’s no sexual activity going on in any of them. What is there? A sex-positive older guy unashamed of his body, modeling underwear and swimwear, and goofing around a in a bar with a friend.

But I’m gay.

I act that way, walk that way, talk that way, and POST that way.

And @Instagram booted me from their platform for it.

This hasn’t just happened to me, and this isn’t the first time I’ve complained about it. I’ve complained when it has happened to other people.

When I talk about this with family and friends, we come up with A MILLION WAYS @Instagram could shield people who don’t want to look at queers. Age-verification, foggy photo "agree-to-view" covers (like they already do for violent photos and videos, which are OK with @Instragram)

But in the end, the one thing that has to stop is the erasure, and disabling of LGBT, sex-positive, and sex ed content on all of @META’s social platforms.

If @Instagram wants a vital and whole gay community to be part of their platform...

They need to stop disabling and deleting things that are not breaking rules, even if they aren’t to the taste of some in the cis, straight community and their "content managers".

And whoever is building their shitty, discriminatory algorithms needs to do better.

And finally, if @Instagram/@meta doesn’t stop purging LGBT people from their platform, we shouldn’t allow them to show up at Pride events and pink-wash themselves. They deserve nothing but scorn for erasing art, artists, thinkers, makers, doers, sex workers, and sex educators.