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

Original author: Beejoli Shah
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For the "average" voyeur , the differences described in the previous part of the article are of little significance. After all, the vagina is also a vagina in Africa, regardless of whether the latter was photographed and entered the site with the light hand of its owner, or is it the work of a porn site that tries to imitate large paid resources and is looking for new members with credit cards. But for all the intransigent users with whom I had a chance to chat, Instagram is not only a means to view erotic photos of strangers. For them, this is a way to find "their" people.

Andrew, a 19-year-old, told me on Kik: “I’m not trying to find a“ nudity ”on Instagram, I’m mostly looking for contacts on Kik. When I’m not excited, the idea doesn’t appeal to me, but otherwise I just want to have erotic correspondence if I don’t have the opportunity to have sex. ” He laments the “propagation” of posts that transfer users to other porn sites. He prefers real users to them.

Users who post their own photos on Instagram are looking for the same as Andrew - self-affirmations and meetings with like-minded people.

“I use Instagram because there are a lot of people here and they like what we do,” 18-year-old Ri told me in a Kik correspondence, talking about the account they created with two friends. “When we started, we had only 3 subscribers, now there are 415 of them.” Ri, along with her friends Lily and Eve, 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 with Lily’s breast with the following text: “Welcome to our page! You are greeted by Lily, Yves and Ri. Just do not send us personal messages, because people complain about our page. " All 29 photos of the girls presented were published during the last hour, and depicted to different degrees naked three young ladies: in some pictures the girls are half-naked, in others - naked, some capture the process of masturbation. Except for the photo from Ri and Lily laughing on the podium in the gymnasium of the gymnasium, there are no faces in any picture.

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 in order not to fall under Instagram radars and calmly develop their fan base, works great. The girls later updated their page with personal information, where they indicated that their account would be public only for three minutes daily. They also prayed that users who accidentally stumbled upon their page would better block it than access Instagram.

“It's 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 frustrations are not uncommon. Most of the nude accounts I've looked at on Instagram contain similar wordings, begging the community members to spare them. And although you will not find such a fuss over #freethenipple, you cannot deny that this is the real meaning of protecting the community, a common struggle against all that amateur pornists consider unnecessary censorship, which is carried out by an autocratic technological sovereign.



But the question remains open: why do not they join the much more loyal communities of Reddit and Tumblr or newer platforms dedicated exclusively to porn, for example, Uplust or Pinsex, which will accept 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: despite modern technologies for dealing with “indecent” content on Instagram, for those who share “nudity”, 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 time-consuming than from a laptop (as Ri and her friends made sure). The process of creating photos is much easier on Instagram - take aim, take a picture, post. In addition, Instagram and Kik can be installed on the same device, which is always at your fingertips.

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

These simple reasons become clear when you think about how many Instagram users are over 30 years old. 53 percent of people using the platform as of 2014 were between 18 and 29 years old. 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 his member from a personal Instagram account, previously filled with "dressed" pictures of a young man surrounded by his family and friends. Click on a photo from the large army of members and breasts available on the platform under the corresponding hashtags, and make sure that it’s not uncommon to see a proud message in a biography that this user is 16-17 years old, and he is in search of peers who are like-minded. Even the most hardcore hashtags will lead you to crowds of teenagers, so avoiding their naked flesh has become a truly Herculean task in order to prevent blurring of the line between the reporter and the child photographer.

“Instagram is the most popular app among teens after Facebook,” said reporter Amanda Hess, who regularly writes about online culture, teens, and sexuality (and who, with a sense of duty, has explored the nature of Eggplant Friday for Slate magazine) . “People want to share photos of erotic content or view them in those places where they are already registered. They don’t want to install any special porn application for this. ”

However, she considers the convenience of using the Instagram platform the main reason that teenagers publish their nude photos there. Instagram’s privacy settings are “much more intuitive than on Facebook,” says Hess. - 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 need to add grandparents, a crowd of cousins ​​and your mother’s boss as friends.”


Of course, when it comes to sexual interaction, the issue of volunteerism is fundamental, but the situation becomes much more ambiguous when it comes to minors. During an investigation into the “gang of teenage sexsters” in Virginia, in an interview for The Atlantic magazine, Hannah Rosin noted that the spread of “nudity”, even at the request of the person captured in the photo, can have serious consequences. According to Virginia County Deputy Sheriff Louise in Virginia, “storing or distributing photos of naked people under the age of majority - even if these are their own photos - could result in criminal prosecution under state child pornography laws.” Katie Notopolous from the BuzzFeed news portal faced the same problems, trying to find out the reasons for the unexpected flood from photos of members who flooded her Snapchat, often posted by teenagers. (The best consolation BuzzFeed could find for her was that in the end, she was "likely" to escape the prison).

Nevertheless, the “naked" exchange is a mutually desired form of communication for them and helps to understand the sexual aspect of human life. By sharing their nude photos in apps like Instagram, teens can beneficially study and develop their sexual identity. And, regardless of age, this can be a surprisingly 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 pornographic content Instagram, now I am gracefully fluttering among tons of content. And despite the fact that many photos are undeniably sexy, they are no longer a shame for me, which I had frantically deleted from my Instagram story. Even as a voyeur, I now felt so clearly part of the group that I intentionally did not publish all the hashtags used by users, fearing to harm this close-knit community.

Again, given the stubbornness of users like Ri and Ramon, I'm not really worried about this. And while Instagram continues to sweep porn hashtags 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 for one): #aaaasssss, #seducee, #becauseboobs, #freakshit.

Although these porn lovers have nothing to do with politics, human rights defenders and big fans of nudes could learn from the Instagram community his quiet refusal to capitulate. Regardless of the political preferences of users, people like Ri and Ramon are living examples of how to skillfully send (and to hell) censorship and restrictions on sexual freedom. Instagram is now at a crossroads, and if you look closer, the service has already stepped one foot on the wrong path of development. And this fact can make the service officially surrender in a battle that it has already lost.

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

“Thousands of the same hashtags mean you're not the only one to enjoy porn,” he says.

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