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Another kink purge by social media – or is it always like this?
We’re sure a lot of Libidex lovers are looking forward to giving their latex an airing at one or more of the fetish parties and festivals returning to kink’s international calendar over the next few months.
So it’s disappointing to see complaints on social media this week that Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) might be having another of its occasional ‘kink purges’. The last one, back in early 2021, involved a crackdown on people using the hashtag #latex, and led to indiscriminate bans, takedowns and account deletions of people posting latex images that were mostly non-explicit fashion shots.
This time, there are fears that those irrepressible Meta bots are set on causing problems for organisers of fetish events. Perhaps the very events you’d be interested in attending… if you could only find out about them.
Vancouver Fetish Weekend promoter Isaac Terpstra certainly caused a stir when he posted on Facebook earlier this week: “It’s looking very much like the Vancouver Fetish Weekend Instagram account has been taken down for ‘soliciting sexual so and so’, despite logging a dispute. FFS. Beyond brutal.”
He added: “I appealed it when it first was taken down, and it said, we'll review it, and if your dispute is successful, you’ll be able to access it within 24 hours. For 24 hours it was disabled, but then it was actually gone.”
Happily, after Isaac “dug up an even deeper way of disputing it”, the Canadian summer festival’s page was reinstated — although he admitted he would be holding his breath for another day or two to see if it was going to stick. “Ugh, so stressful!” he complained.
His post attracted a flurry of responses from other event hosts reporting similar problems. Florida Fetish Weekend organiser Glenn Catapano, who has had endless problems with Facebook over the years, commented:
“We live this hell every day as a business. By putting the word fetish in our brand, we shoot ourselves in the foot. My livelihood is constantly at risk.”
Davide LaPara of Montreal’s Cirque de Boudoir commented: “We lost our Instagram and had no recourse… had to start over with a new account.”
René, host of the German Fetish Ball Weekend, wrote: “I had this three times now. Algorithm takes it down, I click the review button, 24 hours later, page is gone. I go to the help site, request a manual review and the site is up again. And the next day the algorithm takes it down again.”
While London’s Torture Garden did not join in this specific thread, it too is known to have had its share of social media problems. So being the world’s biggest fetish partying brand is no guarantee of immunity either.
But despite what victims of these actions often believe, it’s unlikely that these takedowns were triggered by ‘haters’ making complaints. In the case of 2021’s so-called ‘latex ban’, there was a far more prosaic explanation.
Basically, the bots were encountering such wide use of #latex by accounts promoting banned sexual services and porn that other, legitimate users of the hashtag became collateral damage — like dolphins caught in a tuna net.
So there may be an alternative explanation for what some fear to be a new crusade against kink by Instagram and co. It could just be that after almost three years of little or no fetish event activity because of the pandemic, this year’s return to full service has registered as a sufficiently unusual spike to trigger automatic algorithmic countermeasures.
If so, things should settle down a bit in due course. But in the meantime, for event info, remember that most events have their own websites that are not vulnerable to the arbitrary decision-making of social media algorithms!
Vancouver Fetish Weekend co-host Isaac Terpstra: stressed out by Instagram takedown
Vancouver Fetish Weekend co-host Isaac Terpstra: stressed out by Instagram takedown
Vancouver Fetish Weekend co-host Isaac Terpstra, aka DJ Pendemonium
Libidex Blog Celebrity Beatrix Devine catches some late sun during Vancouver Fetish Weekend
Vancouver Fetish Weekend provides great views of the Canadian city’s skyline and, er, more…
Aerial performance by Felix Volatile at Montreal’s Cirque de Boudoir (photo: @Jo Gorsky)
RubberFreak captured in one of Florida Fetish Weekend’s various open-air settings
Ready To Ship range by Lady Lucie Latex, one of the brands on this year’s German Fetish Ball catwalk