'The Technology' Suspends The Naked Emperor for Pre-Crime

Instagram censorship

Substack now allows you to share quotes on other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They create a nice little graphic for authors to share their work, so I thought I would give it a go on Instagram.

I don’t have an Instagram account so I filled in the various parts of the from to register for one and I was sent a verification code. After entering the code I clicked the ‘ok’ button, all ready to start posting. However, nothing happened and some text appeared saying “something has gone wrong, please try again later”.

So I decided to log out and back in again, thinking this was just a glitch on my computer. This time I was informed that my newly created account had been suspended. The reason given was that “our technology found that your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our rules. As a result, our technology took action”.

I have 180 days to appeal before they’ll permanently disable my new account. I wonder if a human looks at my appear or ‘the technology’.

I hadn’t posted anything at all and the only information they have about me is my email address that is linked to this Substack account. So clearly their pre-crime technology has my e-mail address on some list somewhere and has decided that I will be posting material in the future that doesn’t follow their rules.

Let’s hope Substack continues to stay censorship free. Moreover, Stripe, the payment system used for paid subscribers also needs to stay censorship free. If ‘the technology’ was suddenly implemented at Stripe and authors couldn’t receive payment unless their appeal was successful then we would be in serious trouble, both in the financial sense and the Orwellian sense.