Instagram Bans BLM
twitter.com
twitter.com
Companies like Instagram are not on anyone's side and do not care about their users complaints and only care about increasing their profits through whatever means necessary and possible.
At the end of the day, they can remove or ban anyone they want for violating their 'guidelines'.
1. A literal phrase that's not very controversial on its own, which many automatically agreed with and stood by.
2. An organization with its own motives and agenda, which enjoyed a period of automatic support as a side-effect.
Most of the outpouring of support was likely for the phrase, whereas much of the pushback was likely against the organization. Not sure where all of this stands now, since its left the news cycle.
Precisely. For anyone who disagreed with their actions and agreed with the phrase, that was the trap in all of this as I previously said. [0] and that probably happened with lots of people and companies, including Instagram. If one 'disagreed' with 'BLM', they are labeled as 'racist' automatically.
Which is why it was very important to distinguish between the phrase vs the organisation itself.
Anyway if this is true it's not surprising a company (capitalist) is now pushing out a Marxist organisation. Some people talk about needing to separate BLM, the slogan, from the organisation and people behind it... But I could never achieve that, especially from the perspective of the UK where "defund the police" made zero sense and would be a terrible idea. (Yes I know everyone has a different idea about what "defund" means here... Which is a problem in itself).
Usually when claims like that appear on the internet, they are jumping to conclusions from unclear data—not always, of course—sometimes the claims turn out to be true. But moderation is guesswork. Given the priors on submissions/tweets/claims like this, the initial guess has to be that it is unlikely that Instagram has banned BLM.
If it really has happened, then the story is obviously on topic for HN. In that case there were certainly be some investigative reporting about it soon, as thinkingemote points out. Someone can submit that and we can have a thread about it.
As a bonus, if such reporting appears to confirm the claim, it will include more information, which will make for a more substantive, less flamewar discussion. This thread is pretty terrible, as is usually the case with very short posts (e.g. tweets) that are low-information on a high-octane topic.