TIPS to Protect SW’s IG Accounts from Deletion, Shadowbanning and Censorship
Dear Online SW Community,
The effects of SESTA/FOSTA began with the government seizing the sites that protected us and have trickled down to our social media platforms, constraining us to surreptitiously offer our services. For some, IG is our livelihood.
I am offering tips that I have tried myself that seem to have helped. My account has been deleted once, since I got it back and made these adjustments, I suspect I’m off IG’s radar. I hope these tips will offer extra protection from account deletion, shadow-banning and censorship.
It’s hard to tell what will work for who and if these tips will work at all, but it’s worth a try.
*Please note, I realize these tips are in themselves self-censorship, but for means of survival, it is what this community has done before and will do again in order to live and work safely.
1. Use a ‘.edu’ email as your sign-in email. There are ways to spoof a .edu email. I suspect attending an institution gives your account more ‘credibility.’ Additionally, I would not recommend using ProtonMail for your sign-in.
2. Switch to a business account. If IG thinks it can make money off of you they’re less likely to delete you. However, do not link your account to Facebook. Do not promote posts. It’s the facade of a business account that is important. Choose a category for your business seemingly unrelated to SW (to civs), like “Art” or “Bakery” or “Escape Game Room” or “Public Swimming Pool.” There’s a lot of options and I change mine every couple months to throw them off my scent.
3. A lot of SW’s already do this: use acronymic language or censor specific words with asterisks. Example of acronymic language: SW or 1312 / Example of censor with asterisk: P*rn or S*x.
4. Delete Facebook and don’t connect to it for any reason.
5. Do not link sites such as, OnlyFans or ManyVids in your website bio link. Link-trees are not safe. In the Linktree TOS: Users of Linktree agree that “Content will not or could not be reasonably considered to be obscene, inappropriate, defamatory, disparaging, indecent, seditious, offensive, pornographic…” and so on. Linktree is owned by “Bolster Creative PTY LTD.” PTY LTD means they are a privately held company owned by two white dudes (with 50 shareholders or less) — exactly like Pornhub. They have no loyalties, moral compass and are billionaires. They do not care about your intellectual property or safety.
My advice: buy your own domain and link the landing page to all your content. Make sure your domain isn’t explicit. Additionally, use your judgement and adjust the word usage in your text-based bio.
Is SLINK an alternative to Linktree? I’d say: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. They do not have a detailed TOS. They are owned by a company called “Drift, Inc” — Drift’s TOS states “You are responsible for the Customer Content that you post on or through the Services, including its legality, reliability, and appropriateness.”
6. Don’t use Emojis in captions, comments, your story OR even to censor your photos. Specifically, no water squirts, no peaches, no eggplants, no devils. I’d drop emoji usage altogether. With this, I’d also recommend to stop hashtag use no matter the subject matter.
7. Last but not least, the best/most fucked up advice I can give you is to EDIT YOUR GENDER. I changed my gender twice. First to “Custom” and wrote “No.” Nothing seemed to happen. Then, I changed it to “Male.” As soon as I changed it to Male the shadowban was lifted: I showed up at the top when searching for my name (which hasn’t happened in years)— you can use a friend or a finsta to check if it worked— I gained 100s of followers over night and all of this was instantaneous. To edit your gender, go to Edit Profile and scroll all the way down.
If you have any suggestions to add to the list, please comment or DM me.
If you have any questions please ask in the comments so other SW’s with the same questions can follow this thread.
I love you.
Lindsay Dye
@dyelindsay
edit 2: 11/12/2019