The Forbidden Picture and the way forward

- about the relationship between Instagram and the blog

In the beginning was Instagram. At least for those who liked to share photos. Not films, not film clips, and not "tweets", but mainly photography in all its forms. A lot has happened since then. Unfortunately, I must say.

The forum grew and I jumped on the bandwagon rather late. To this blog (and initially my bike blog) I linked an account which I therefore named "knifeandbikes". An account that did well and initially grew by around 1000 followers per month. From the very beginning, of course, things did not go so quickly, but the development steadily accelerated in a positive direction. It continued until I had just over twenty-three thousand followers. Then something happened that made all further "organic" growth impossible.

Suddenly Meta got the idea that they should compete with, among others, TikTok, whereupon films began to be awarded at the expense of images. In addition, they became greedy and wanted even more money, which made it very difficult to get posts seen without paying for them. What they call "promotion". Meta wants you to market your images via them, not via quality. Previously, good photos and well-chosen hashtags would have been enough and people found you anyway.

Shortly thereafter, all growth on my account and most others that touched our interest, knives, simply died.

One might be led to believe that this is an innocent picture of a small pocket knife in front of the Arboga Stream, but no!

Then it went downhill even faster. It started with so-called "shadow bans", which means that certain content is  not flagged as forbidden, but is hidden by the algorithms anyway. It can be about both individual posts and entire accounts. After that, it got worse and many many accounts, including mine and large manufacturers of knives, were hidden for all but followers. A phenomenon that has since affected people on and off. Images are flagged as inappropriate or containing violence or nudity even if, in my first case, they depicted a bunch of pine trees in backlight.

The latest in the negative development is that a large number of images and their "hashtags" are banned altogether. The seemingly innocent image above is a good example. Picturesque I thought, life-threatening from Meta's point of view. In this case, there are mainly two # that stick out in the robot eyes of the algorithms. One is the brand itself. Civivi and thus #civivi is not feasible at the moment. The same goes for #knifephotography which was another tag I used. 

Therefore, the image above is "forbidden". Only those who follow me can see it. But not everyone who does it either, but only those who actively scroll through their feed and usually look at my pictures. It's also not searchable, it can't be seen in general feeds and it can't be found as a recommendation even if you as a user would like that type of image.

Is it brutal or does it show something forbidden? No, It is IG or rather Meta that is behind them and Facebook that decided that all knife-related content is violent or at least condoning violence.

This also applies to images depicting a small and very green folding knife against the background of parts of a medieval center in Arboga. Sure an extremist environment, don't you think?

This picture just looks innocent to the untrained eye. One can imagine that it represents a wooden block on a slanted table standing in a meadow. But no...it was marked #knifethrowing which is forbidden. Consequently, it is on par with any ISIS image online

Of course, the development has consequences for those interested in knives and all kinds of other objects with a point or edge, whether it is about HEMA, collecting Japanese swords, or something similar. Hunting pictures and the like have always been prohibited, so anyone interested in that has always had to look elsewhere.

But unfortunately, that means it's getting harder and harder to navigate the biggest platforms like Facebook and Instagram and everything else owned by Meta. Starting over on another platform is of course a possibility, but not the easiest thing to do. Especially not when you have invested a lot of time over many years to build up an account with all that goes with it.

It doesn't just apply to me, of course, but to many of the small businesses that have become dependent on these channels for marketing. In those situations, it is not fun when rules and policies are changed completely arbitrarily. This applies, for example, to many small manufacturers of knives who have seen this as an excellent way to reach and communicate with their customers.

For that reason, I will continue to focus primarily on this blog. The posts are neither trending nor going viral but those who are interested can find them through searches or by just following me. In addition, the texts remain, they do not disappear in the noise that is a feed you scroll through. In addition, it grows slowly but surely. In the past year, it has grown to around 10-11 thousand readers per month. And that number is steadily going in the right direction. 

So I hope you join me on the journey ahead!

/ J - primary blogger, secondary Instagrammer