By Jahnavi Sen / The Wire
New Delhi: When Instagram recently took down a video of Uttar Pradesh resident Prabhakar Maurya worshipping a statue of state chief minister Yogi Adityanath, posted by the satirical anonymous account ‘Superhumans of Cringetopia’, it said the post violated the platform’s ‘nudity and sexual content’ guidelines. That was strange – both the man and the idol in the video were fully clothed, and there was no visible sexual connotation whatsoever.
At the time, the administrators of the @cringearchivist handle – who refer to themselves as a group of academics and journalists – assumed that there was a mistake in the platform’s AI-run oversight mechanism, which had incorrectly flagged the post as portraying nudity.
Days after reporting on this confusing takedown, The Wire has learnt from a well-placed source at Meta that it was not, in fact, due to an algorithmic glitch. The post was taken down – and that too just minutes after it was posted – only because it was reported by Instagram user @amitmalviya. That’s the handle belonging to Amit Malviya, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s infamous IT Cell.
The internal Instagram report, which The Wire has accessed, makes clear that the reported post was taken down immediately without any of the company’s moderators looking at it, based simply on the identity of the reporter (Malviya). In fact, any post that Malviya reports is treated the same way – an immediate removal from the platform, no questions asked. Just in the month of September, the Meta source told The Wire, Malviya reported 705 posts on Instagram – all of which were taken down.
As The Wire has reported, @cringearchivist has seen seven of its posts removed by Instagram in the last few months. This, the administrators of the satirical account said, has forced them to go ‘private’ (only followers can see their posts), thereby limiting their growth and reach. Now, new followers have to fill a form before they are allowed to see the content posted on the page.
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