At MeatEater, we try to connect with, educate, and entertain our audience by sharing a regular dose of hunting and fishing related images on our social media pages. Obviously, some of these images document things like butchering a deer or cleaning a fish. At all times, we’re trying to share the realities associated with procuring wild protein. So when Steve posted an image of a filleted king salmon on Instagram, and that image got censored as “sensitive content”, we were a bit confused. How is sensitive content defined, and how are decisions made to flag certain posts as disturbing or offensive?
Here’s Instagram’s official policy:
To help people avoid posts they’d rather not see, we may limit the visibility of certain posts that have been flagged by the Instagram community for containing sensitive content. Photos and videos containing sensitive or graphic content may appear with a warning to let people know about the content before they view it.
Basically, it reads as though anyone who might find an image offensive can appeal to administrators at Instagram to get an image censored. We’re all for flagging content that is overtly graphic, insensitive, demeaning, or downright offensive. But censoring a picture of a salmon fillet? We’re calling bullshit on this one. In our mind, that’s no more graphic, offensive, or disturbing than posting photo of a slice of pizza. Thousands of pictures of food are posted on Instagram on a daily basis. How is this any different?
