Women are changing their gender on Instagram to male in an attempt to avoid sexist censorship, following claims the social media platform polices those who list themselves as men less than it does women.
Instagram users who are benefiting most from altering their gender to male include female pole dancers, fitness instructors, and sex workers, the HuffPost reports, with many insisting that a new algorithm released by the app in April to police its content has an unfair bias against women.
The Facebook-owned platform's new algorithm can hide any 'inappropriate content' — both videos and pictures — from the public Explore and hashtag pages automatically and without explanation.
Bias: Pole dancers and instructors have accused Instagram of censoring their content. Michelle (pictured), a pole dancer, changed her gender to male on Instagram
Experiment: Michelle found her content engagement increased when her profile was labelled as a male. This inspired @everybodyvisible to encourage it's followers to change their gender
Movement: Other pole dancers have shared the bias on their own pages, encouraging people to pay attention to shadowbanning on the social media platform
Shadowbanning is a term coined and used for multiple platforms on the internet to help block spam and other sensitive content automatically instead of requiring manual censorship.
For Instagram specifically, the platform uses shadowbanning to prevent bots, block spammers, and protect younger users against material the platform deems 'too sensitive' for them to view.
This automatic algorithm is necessary for a platform with more than 1 billion users, but it also faces claims it is flawed with what exactly it bans automatically with no explanation.
A woman named Michelle, who is an Australian pole dancer, personally noticed a change to how her content was viewed on Instagram following the April algorithm change, HuffPost reports.
In October, she decided to change her gender from female to male to see if her content was 'shadowbanned' less after seeing a severe decline in who engaged with her content. She then saw an increase in views and likes on her pictures and videos within three days of changing her gender on the platform.
'It’s ridiculous that we have to resort to trying this kind of thing,' Michelle told the publication, explaining how pole dancers specifically use Instagram to share training videos and grow their businesses.
Instagram page @everybodyvisible, an activism page dedicated to the pole dancing community, also shared with its followers how gender swapping on Instagram could help improve female user's content engagement.
'Is it bizarrely less "inappropriate" for a "male" owned account to post "borderline" content of women and femme-presenting bodies than the actual owner of the body THEMSELVES?' The page questioned.
Other bias: An instructor named Elizabeth (pictured) shared with her followers in June the hashtags banned relating to pole dancing
Know the difference: The @everybodyvisible account also informed its followers about the banned hashtags related to the pole dancing community
The page then implored its followers to test out the hack and see if they, too, experienced an increase in engagement by posting the same content under the guise of being a male-owned account.
Multiple commenters shared online with the community how they also experienced an increase in engagement once they made the gender switch.
'Changed mine a week ago and engagement has definitely gone up, gained lots of followers quite quickly even though I haven’t really posted in a while,' a pole dancer named Alice revealed on Instagram. 'Lots of my old videos seem to suddenly be showing in the explore page. This is so ridiculous and makes me so sad.'
Another commenter wrote: 'I feel like my engagement has picked up and bit but my posts are still being blocked from tags I use.'
Other women also experienced an increase in an engagement the first few days upon changing their genders, but there were some who saw no increase or still had issues with blocked tags.
Not only are there accusations of Instagram being bias against women and other marginalized communities, but users have also accused the platform of blocking specific hashtags targeted towards pole dancing.
An instructor named Elizabeth shared with her followers in June the hashtags banned relating to pole dancing.
'There seems to have been a massive “cleanse” on Instagram and pole dancers have been deemed dirty and inappropriate...or as Instagram puts it we don’t “meet Instagram’s community guidelines,"' she wrote at the time.
'There has been lots of talk about shadownbans lately but this purge of hashtags is hard to mistake as being targeted towards pole dancers. If you use a banned hashtag your posts will not show up in your intended feeds.'
Informative: The page explained to followers how they could know if they were getting shadowbanned by the platform based on the hashtags they use
Elizabeth also explained the continual use of banned hashtags could result in someone's account being shadowbanned from Instagram, again preventing the users from coming up on the public Explore page.
The banned hashtags at the time included #poledancing, #poledancer, #unitedbypole, #poledancenation, and #polesportorg, Elizabeth told followers.
Instagram first denied it targeted the sport when banning hashtags but later apologized for the action after a petition went viral against the platform, HuffPost reported.
DailyMail.com contacted Instagram for a comment about the gender bias accusations and banned hashtags.
'We want to make sure the content we recommend to people on Instagram is safe and appropriate for everyone,' a spokesperson for Facebook said in a statement. 'Ensuring women feel heard is an essential part of that effort. Gender information from profiles has no impact on content we filter from hashtags or the Explore page.'
The statement also stated the algorithm used by Instagram does not consider gender in the 'gender entry field' when filtering its content from the platform.