'Sexy jail’ and performative transparency: evaluating shadowbanning notifications and appeals in Instagram’s Account Status amongst pole dancing content creators

Abstract

Through a survey amongst 100 users who post pole dancing content, this study evaluates the efficacy of Instagram's Account Status tools for the transparency and appeal of shadowbanning. Instagram's 2023 Account Status update appeared, on paper, to be a revolution for shadowbanned users: finally, after having to guess if they were shadowbanned since 2019, users could check if their content and profile violated Instagram's newly published Recommendation Guidelines, making it ineligible for recommendations on the Explore page and to non-followers. However, this paper's findings show that pole dancers – a demographic greatly affected by algorithmic precarity in the creator economy, crucial in providing some of the first examples of shadowbanning – found Account Status tools to be ineffective and discriminatory. Users surveyed found that the update merely informs them of violations’ detections, falling short of educating them about improving posting behaviour and of providing significant redress mechanisms. As such, this paper finds Account Status to be an exercise in performative transparency, a corporate box-ticking exercise engaging with a form of disclosure surrounding governance decisions that only serves the purpose of dodging opacity accusations without meaningfully engaging in communications about governance.