Instagram Vs. Dick Pics

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Today, The Slice published a fascinating deep dive by Beejoli Shah about the DIY porn community that continues to thrive on Instagram despite the company’s Herculean efforts to get rid of it. There are many places on the internet that will welcome your naked pics with open arms: Reddit, Tumblr, even your own blog. So what makes people engage in a cat-and-mouse game with an app that goes to such lengths to keep their site porn-free?

It’s a piece that’s actually been about 7 months in the making. Some months ago, I read a great piece by Adrian Chen in Wired about the laborers who scrub lewd content on Facebook and other social media. Chen positioned content moderation as neverending, even futile, and it got me thinking about the people who were posting said lewd content on platforms that simply didn’t want them. Beejoli really committed, and spoke with a handful of people who, in their own quiet way, are admirable examples of how to stick it to censorship and limits on sexual freedom.

Go read the piece.

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