Did you know there are tags banned on Instagram? More to the point, did you know that hashtags for bipolar disorder, depression, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders and other mental health tags are banned on Instagram? Up until recently, I didn’t know this. Upon finding it out, however, I think it’s incredibly important to speak out against it. While I realize that Instagram may have the best of intentions with these bans, banning mental health/mental illness tags on Instagram is not the way to help people.
What Tags Are Banned on Instagram
According to Chelsea Evans of Markitors, many tags are banned on Instagram\ and, of course, most of them have nothing to do with mental health. And, honestly, I have no idea why most of them are banned. Examples include #brain, #curvy, #woman (not #man, by the way) and about a whole whack of others that, to me, make no sense to ban. And while I have no doubt Evans put a lot of work into making this list, she’s missing many critical mental health hashtags that are banned on Instagram.
The banned tags on Instagram that relate to mental health that I’ve seen include:
- #depression
- #bipolardisorder
- #mooddisorder
- #selfharm
- #harm
- #selfinjury
- #suicide
- #eatingdisorder
- #eatingdisorders
- #anorexia
- #builimia
- #proana (this is related to anorexia)
- #promia (this is related to bulimia)
And yet the following mental health Instagram tags are not banned:
- #MDD/#majordepression
- #bipolar
- #mooddisorders
- #NSSI/#nonsuicidalselfinjury
- #injury
- #borderline
- #bpd
- #schizophrenia
- #ana (this is a euphemism for anorexia, often used by people who are “pro ana”)
- #mia (this is a euphemism for bulimia, often used by people who are “pro mia”)
- #madpride
- #antipsychiatry
- #antipsychology
(Things like #attackthecapitol and #terrorism are not banned, by the way. Bipolar disorder is scarier than terrorism, apparently.)
I’m sure there are many others as well.
What these lists show is that these bannings are practically arbitrary. #Bipolardisorder is somehow scary and bad but #bipolar is okay? Give me a break.
(Quick note here: between bipolar disorder chatter and antipsychiatry chatter, I know which one hurts people and that’s the one that is allowed. This, again, point to the arbitrary nature of these bans.)
What Happens When You Use a Banned Mental Health Tag on Instagram?
If you tag a post on Instagram with one of the banned hashtags, nothing happens. You are never made aware that the hashtag is banned. That’s why I had no idea it was happening for so long. I, for example, use the hashtag #depression all the time. (What I suspect happens is that it hurts your reach and influence, but that is just a suspicion on my part.)
The most obvious way of knowing that a mental health tag on Instagram is banned is by searching for it. If you search for #eatindisorder, you get no results, but you do get this message:
Can we help?
Posts with words you’re searching for often encourage behavior that can cause harm and even lead to death. If you’re going through something difficult, we’re like to help.
After you say that you don’t need help a couple of times, you can get to the posts with that hashtag. What you cannot do, however, is follow that hashtag.
In other words, all this time I’ve been producing posts for the depression community (among others) and they can’t even follow the hashtag to get them. Moreover, I think Instagram has been penalizing me for using hashtags that I didn’t even know were banned because they “often encourage behavior that can cause harm and even lead to death,” even though, I, Natasha Tracy, am not producing posts that would do that.
Banned Mental Health Hashtags on Instagram Are Bullshit
Let’s be honest; this is bullshit. Not only is it clear that the banned mental health hashtags on Instagram are pretty much arbitrary, but it’s also clear that they’re easy to get around if, indeed, your purposes are nefarious. So if you’re trying to cause harm to people with bipolar disorder, you would simply use the #bipolar hashtag instead of the #bipolardisorder hashtag. It’s ridiculous.
Banning Instagram Tags on Mental Health/Mental Illness Hurts People
I’ve read many arguments as to why banning mental health tags on Instagram is misguided. One argument is that people use hashtags to communicate with their community. For example, if you have an eating disorder and want to stay in touch with everyone else with an eating disorder, then you’ll likely want to follow the #eatingdisorder tag. This allows you to find people who are battling just like you that you identify with. It allows you to get support. It allows you to find others to connect with. It’s these connections that can actually form a support network and help people get and stay better.
But the thing I really object to is the suggestion that merely talking about mental health/mental illness topics is somehow harmful. Talking about my life involves mental health/mental illness topics. My work is all mental health and mental illness. These are things that comprise my brain on a daily basis — not to hurt people, but to help people. But banning tags on Instagram that relate to mental health and mental illness suggests that there is something wrong with talking about these subjects. In fact, it implies there is something wrong with the people who are dealing with these subjects. If we cannot talk about difficult subjects, then we can never hope to make them better. If we cannot openly and honestly talk about bipolar disorder and depression and self-harm and eating disorders then we can’t hope to make the lives of people battling these things better.
Of course, a person might tag something that is pro-self-harm with the #selfharm tag. Of course, a person could tag an anti-bipolar message with the term #bipolardisorder. But just because a tiny percentage of people would do that doesn’t mean that everyone should be banned from using tags that legitimately indicate important subjects.
I don’t have an issue with Instagram banning tags that are nothing but insults and epithets. That makes sense. But banning tags that are merely words that in and of themselves are not harmful is ridiculous, unfair and discriminatory.
I understand that Instagram’s motivation is positive. I understand they are trying to help people. But what they are doing further stigmatizes people for merely talking about subjects Instagram thinks are dangerous. If they want to include a warning with certain hashtags, well, that’s their prerogative, but actually banning hashtags is, without a doubt, a net negative and not a positive. We — the people who actually deal with these subjects every single day — need to be supported in our expressions and attempts to help ourselves and others and what Instagram is doing right now is the opposite. They are harming us. They are harming me and my bipolar brothers and sisters by trying to erase us and others with mental illness.
Find me on Instagram here, where I will not be invisible and I will be talking about mental health and mental illness (and occasionally post cat pictures).
Robert
You keep saying you, you, you
Dearest Robert, have you looked in the mirror lately???
Were any of your words censored on this blog?
Be thankful you don’t live in a communist country
Robert
You keep saying you, you, you…
Dearest Robert have you looked at yourself need a mirror lately?
You can’t have the silencing of your opponents + support in pretending words harm people + hold belief in banning words + hold belief in censoring people AND still expect that you and what you like should be exempt from this process. In essence, you are expecting support in being a corrupt tyranny. Your demands are basically that you get to define who, what, where and why censorship is enabled. Does that sound just to you? Does it sound fair? Does it sound equitable? Does it sound principled or ethical? Does it sound feasible? Does it sound acceptable to others?
You could have argued for the inalienability of free speech, you could have used the precedent of the history you normally decry of the men who fought for freedom and legal individual rights, you could have evoked freedom of speech as the bedrock of your nation–free speech as a pillar of that oppressive tyranny: the patriarchy. Yes, that patriarchy that feminists have been busy dismantling.
You could have argued for freedom and the necessity of an open exchange of ideas in determining the truth, assessing best practice, generating sound and fair policies. You could have argued that’s how we learn right and wrong–through exploring ideas, navigating experiences and communicating openly without fear of repraisal or punitive action.
You could have started a much needed society wide discussion around the problem that despite being privately owned companies and therefore private digital “spaces” we occupy as guests of, when we communicate on social media platforms, the real reality is those platforms are the mainstay of our interactive public life–they are the forum, the park, the public square, the agora for contemporary society and require the broader societal rules, responsibilities, privileges, rights, protections that a public free space would be beholden to.
You could have argued from a clinical, psychological standpoint that words don’t harm people and that it is harmful to protect people from emotions, or uncomfortable experiences, such as seeing things they don’t like or disagree with. An ethos that no one should ever have to contend with anything they don’t want is catastrophic to mental health. Online communications are already amazingly safe zones to explore exposure because they are entirely voluntary and can be shut off or exited any time.
You could have said, shielding people and silencing dissent make a person more ill, more sensitive and it infantilizes them to have no self accountability. You could have discussed the risk of corruption, and toxicity weaponizing censorship for vindictive purposes. You could have shown that coddling and protectiveness instead lead to expecting adults to swoop in and “parent” via deleting, censoring, banning, punishing people and words that the adult-child believes might hurt their feelings, thus stunting them as perpetual entitled demanding children who can’t even be near potential conflict and treat all friction as an attack by evil parties. You could have shown evidence supporting exposure successfully making people stronger You could have defended our innate nature as humans: antifragility, resilience and strength. You could have exposed the idea that we can be harmed by hashtags for the absurd unsupportable assertion it is.
But you went in (maybe unconsciously, because you seem like a good person) expecting hypocrisy in your favour. You explicitly argued it is ok to ban offensive or dangerous words as part of your argument that they shouldn’t ban them. Explicitly! You actually said that in earnest, appearing like some caricatured meta-humour parody of the social justice anti-oppressor ideologue. Don’t take it too hard. Those contradictions, irrationalité and entitlements are deeply embedded in the ideology that you were indoctrinated with.
The delusion that seeing words damages someone, and that there are victim classes to protect from power classes who oppress is your ideology. It is the mainstream dominant ideology and is the basis of instagram’s policy, but you expect to have absolute power to have what you want but there not to be the things you don’t want. Do you think you should be able to control the internet or does the grandiosity have a border, like you just want to rule instagram, maybe Facebook? It sounds like what an oppressor demands.
At least take comfort you aren’t a victim or marginalized. Your voice, it’s confidence and certainty, the expectation at acceptance, your sense that your ideology is somehow inalienable give it away. It’s not the voice of someone fearful or victimized, not the voice of someone timid because they know an attack is coming if they make noise. Your voice is indignant and impatient, like the voice of privilege and entitlement.
I feel bad that you were indoctrinated that way, in an institution you should have been able to trust, but your beliefs support banned tags, you don’t have an argument to make if someine else’s truth is that those words need banning. You can always leave instagram, that’s what folks advise me when my view is outside the acceptable normp. Mostly they just delete and ban me, but sometimes they tell me to leave and that I dont belong. There’s always some warrior for respect and inclusion calling me names and telling me I don’t belong. In my decades as a leftist activist, we didn’t demonstrate respect and inclusion by ridicule and exclusion. At the time, that seemed clear to us, seemed subject to principle. Different times I guess. I’ve been unable to fall into line with the left’s contemporary otrthodoxy which has left me an orphan who is routinely attacked by both left and right, like a prisoner without the protection of gang affiliation
I do fully support hash tags being free of censorship.
Any censorship, whether it be on an adhoc and arbitrary basis, whether it is biased, slanted or just slightly microaggressively prejucial, AND even if it is supported with sober argument and fine-feeling-justifications, censorship remains unacceptable.
Censorship is toxic and is an act of tyranny. Censorship erodes democracy. It is an act of cowardice and its implementation is a symptom that a system is already malfunctioning. It is never a neutral tool.
Censorship fuels hate and even terrorism: consider:
1. You(the media, universities, the feminists, pro-censors, protected speech and words-are-harmful/violence advocates) exile people with unpopular views and unorthodox positions from regular, mainstream public forums, isolating them and leaving them ungrounded ans vulnerable.
2. You label disparate factions, and individuals,, lumping together already unhappy antisocial folk with vilified identity groups and their advocacy organizations . They then may begin to see each others as allies. I watched themsinstream print media and municipal news stations equate and conflate criminally active self-described “Incels” with legal aid non-profits who provide fathers representation and support in family court. This is mainstream orthodox behaviour that no one bat’s an eye over. It is akin to saying meth labs and women’s shelters are of the same ilk.
3. You control the narrative, setting up and knocking down straw men, putting words in their mouths, mocking and taunting while denying them the ability to respond. You use the far reaching contemptuous yet hysterical media and reduce all matters to a simplistic binary, winnowing the world down into an us-them opposition and map good and evil on to it arbitrarily.
4. Now, you’ve radicalized them, you’ve given them common cause and desperate fraternal feelings while making them easy to manipulate and hungry for leadership and direction. They are now concentrated and ripe for weaponization . You’ve taught them who their enemies are–both human and institutional.
5. With gaslighting, aggression, animosity, zero sum gaming, dishonesty, hostility, injustice, disregard for truth and evidence, and utilizing dehumanizing language, you’ve defined the terms, and eradicated the rules of engagement.
6. You’ve taken all that powerless rage and driven it underground, out of your sights, into secrecy with all the paranoia, malevolent bonding and toxic buildup that entails, forcing them to form necessarily tight and purposeful, cells you could almost call them.
And what will you have accomplished? What do you get out of the bargain? Oh yes, you won’t have to see words you don’t like, you won’t run the risk of experiencing unhappy feelings you get sometimes while voluntarily reading material posted online. Censorship can do all that for you. How do you like the outcome?
I’ve been a bit snarky or catty at times and I apologize. I don’t take pleasure in how I perceive things or the futility of speaking up. I don’t take pleasure in sticking my head out to get clocked. Obviously, you are dedicated to bringing about more good and health to the world. I don’t oppose you, but often oppose your methodology and am critical of what you promote frequently. I’ve accidentally lost or deleted more long boorish comments than I’ve posted, so, it could be worse
These issues are complex and difficult and the times are markedly oversensitive and contentious. Society is polarized and not commited to working together or hearing each other and more and more favours this fantasy of canceling, silencing, banning, censoring, segregating, denying the “other”. There aren’t villains and good guys. It is a societal pathology and malaise we are in. Everyone is on the same team and have more common ground than difference, but have been poisoned with toxic perceptions, interprétations, and idéologies. It isn’t accidental. Regular good people who aren’t evil, and want a better world-_indeed the people most motivated by such purpose whether left or right have been subverted by ideologies put forth 40-50 years ago by the left and by the right, whose stated goals are destruction. There is nothing ahead that will be easy to sort out. Please at least consider caution when unleashing something as game changing as censorship.
Thank you for your compassionate concern for keeping these issues in the forefront. Hiding them is close to denying them.
if the actual reason is anything other than avoiding legal liability i’d be shocked
As always great work, Natasha. Instagram is a photo journal of happy people. They do not want anyone to burst that happiness bubble with nasty hashtags about mental illness in any form. Instagram has its uses but it is not for informing people about mental illness. It is great for showing the cookies you just baked or the holiday you just went on because you are mentally well. And maybe that is how we should use that platform.