Sanguisugabogg Create New Instagram Account and Explain Why Their Old One Got Banned
Ohio death metallers Sanguisugabogg are back on social media for now.
After the band was suddenly yanked off of Instagram a few days ago, there was a lot of confusion as to what happened to get their account, which boasted over 120,000 followers. Left with just a Facebook account and an account on that platform that everyone will forever call Twitter, they announced that they were appealing the decision. Now, they’ve started a backup Instagram page while they look into getting their original page put back up, and we have a little bit of information on what happened: they apparently got flagged for a copyright violation.
On the band’s new Instagram, they gave an update, saying:
“Thank you guys for following and sharing this page as we work with meta to get our old one back! Long story short there’s a design with a fish we posted that got flagged for copyright! Dumb move on our part but hopefully this gets worked out! Zucked at over 123k.”
It becomes a reminder of the difficulties of social media as a tool for advertising. Unfortunately, you pretty much have to have a social media presence to be a band. But social media is run by private companies that make rather arbitrary decisions based on a weird set of principles. On Facebook I’ve literally reported actual swastikas and pictures of lynchings and Facebook told me those don’t violate their terms of service, but I once got a Facebook ban for saying “British people are weird.” I once had to appeal a Facebook ban because I posted an Against Me! video and the album cover violated Facebook’s nudity policy. One time I got a Facebook ban for calling myself a bitch. Another site I worked for had trouble posting something in our store related to the band Pissed Jeans because Instagram thought we were trying to sell actual pissed jeans. And apparently a band can be permanently deleted from Instagram for accidentally posting a copyrighted image of a fish.
Private companies, legally, have the right to monitor their social media platforms in whatever way they want. You have no freedom of speech on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. You have no right to be treated fairly or reasonably. They don’t have to offer you a reasonable appeals process if they don’t want to. The logic of the free market is that, if you don’t like the way a particular social media platform works, you don’t have to use it. But social media is so important to marketing that it’s actually not that optional anymore, and everyone is sort of forced into this situation where they have to bow down to the arbitrary and unfair decision making of these companies with really weird rules.
Hopefully Sanguisugabogg ends up getting their original profile restored soon, but given the arbitrariness of how Meta works, who knows.
