CONSENT
An important insight that came from Hackney’s conversation with Instagram is their original intention behind the nudity policy. Facebook/Instagram are worried about consent. This is a crucial concept in online content creation. Furthermore, most people are in favor of stopping child pornography, revenge porn, blackmail. Simply think of all the trouble caused by teenagers sharing nude photos of each other online.
Instagram doesn’t usually take issue with consent in photography. Photography law is a murky area in social media content. In the United States it is illegal for someone to commercially use your image without consent. This doesn’t matter for your average fun loving Instagram account, but many accounts are monetized and there is serious money involved here.
Also Instagram seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Most artists claim that context is the missing ingredient to Instagram’s policies. There should be more human moderation and Instagram should be able to use context to determine a fine art account from bullies with hateful agendas.
IMAGE: A screengrab from Pink Meth a site where users can post/view “revenge porn” (distributing sexually explicit material without consent).