Instagram’s found itself in a heap of shit after it mistakenly removed an innocuous (by any standards) image, posted by Singapore fashion blogger Aarti Olivia, of three plus-sized women in bikinis.
The image was intended specifically to promote non-discriminatory body standards as part of an “every body is a bikini body” campaign, according to a Fusion report.
“Obviously Fatphobic trolls had reported the image and Instagram blindly removed it,” Olivia told Fusion’s Kristen V. Brown via email. “Which really angered me.”
Alerted to their error, Instagram restored the photo and sent an apology email to Olivia.
“But the ‘error’ here is not the chance oversight that led Olivia’s bikini photo to be taken down,” Brown opined. “The error is the standard hard-coded into minds of people reviewing those requests that certain expressions of the female body are lewd.”
Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, was already in a heap of shit last week, after the site accidentally banned an ad featuring a plus-sized model for not adhering to its “health and fitness” guidelines, which say, “Ads may not depict a state of health or body weight as being perfect or extremely undesirable.”
Read the Fusion report here.
