Instagram is hiding content hosted by the pole dancing community's most commonly used hashtags.
Pole dancers, performers and entrepreneurs say that the censorship is threatening their livelihood. Sweden-based instructor and performer, Anna-Maija Nyman, told Yahoo Lifestyle.:
The censorship is affecting our whole community because it makes it harder to share and connect, I felt that our community is in danger and under attack.
The controversy for pole dancers began on July 19, when hashtags such as #poledancing, #poledancer and #polesportorg were noticeably wiped off all content previously aggregated by pole dancers around the world.
To alert fellow dancers, California-based pole star, Elizabeth Blanchard, wrote in a post that day that the banning of 19 hashtags appeared to be an effort to shadowban the community. She wrote:
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. There has been lots of talk about shadowbans lately
but this purge of hashtags is hard to mistake as being targeted towards pole dancers.
Shadowbanning is a method used by social networks to quietly silence an account by curtailing how it gets engagement without blocking the ability to post new content. Shadowbanned users are not told that they have been affected, they can continue
to post messages, add new followers and comment on or reply to other posts. But their [content] doesn't appear in the feeds, their replies may be suppressed and they may not show up in searches.
Australia-based instructor, performer and business owner Michelle Shimmy points out that the current restrictions facing pole dancers on the social media platform are part of a much larger issue having to do with Instagram's policy changes to
manage 'problematic' content, which she suggests are inherently sexist.
Apparently Instagram has apologised for its censorship but nobody is expecting a change i th eplicy.
Hamburg's famous nightlife scene got a new attraction with the opening of Germany's first bar dedicated to porn karaoke.
The Porno Karaoke Bar was opened by German drag queen Olivia Jones in the city's St. Pauli district.
Visitors are invited to go on stage and moan along to clips from porn films from the 1970s and 1980s as they soundlessly play on screens in the background. Currently, visitors can choose from nearly 30 retro clips.
Olivia Jones commented:
It's funnier than I thought it would be. At the beginning, people are reserved and don't dare to try it out, but meanwhile we've noted that we can hardly save ourselves from the guests who are galloping onto the stage.
German sex shops are inviting customers to try out virtual reality porn inside new VR booths.
The booths cost just under £1 per minute to use and are available in 14 cities across Germany.
They are built by German firm Virtual Real Pleasure and each booth -is about the size of a small bathroom. Booths cots the shop £8,000 to install.
Inside is a high-end virtual reality (VR) headset and an easy-clean leather chair to sit on. Customers pick a VR smut flick, which then plays on a TV on the opposite side of the booth. The booth is big enough to incorporate two people at once.
Instagram is hiding content hosted by the pole dancing community's most commonly used hashtags.
Hamburg's famous nightlife scene got a new attraction with the opening of Germany's first bar dedicated to porn karaoke.
German sex shops are inviting customers to try out virtual reality porn inside new VR booths.
