The ‘offensive’ photos that Instagram rejects

Early in March 2015, Canadian artist and poet Rupi Kaur uploaded a picture to Instagram of herself in her room, wearing jogging bottoms stained with menstrual blood. Lying with her back to the camera in a nondescript bedroom, nothing about the image was strange.

A few days later, Kaur found her image had been removed, so she reposted it. A few days after that, it was removed again. This time she found out why: Instagram’s moderators had deleted the picture for “violation of community standards”. Kaur responded with a rallying post on her Facebook and Tumblr accounts that was shared 11,000 times. “We will not be censored,” she wrote.

Kaur’s photograph is just one of the 270 deleted images featured in Pics Or It Didn’t Happen , a contemporary art book by digital artists Arvida Byström and Molly Soda that brings the pictures Instagram have removed back into the spotlight. But the book is about much more than simply shocking us with controversial pictures; both Byström and Soda agree that some level of social media censorship is needed.

“I do understand why censorship exists. I’m not ‘free the nipple’ because I don’t give a s*** about that,” Soda says. “But I do think that females presenting bodies are going to be censored more – as they’re always going to be in conversation with sex – no matter what the topic of the photo is.”

Pics Or It Didn’t Happen exposes an ominous flaw in Instagram’s community guidelines: women are getting an extremely hard time. “For a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram,” the guidelines read – and yet bare chested men remain largely uncensored, while topless images of women are guaranteed to be deleted. And it is not only nipples: when Soda and Byström asked their combined 207,600 Instagram followers for examples of censored images, the book explains: “We began to see patterns in the types of images that had been subjected to censorship.”