Meta has been deleting a lot of our sexy faves in the past month or so, a grim trend that has been picking up in the past year. As someone who plays the role of unpaid and often fairly powerless intermediary between deleted users and the Meta overlords, here are my two cents on why the situation is worsening, why my “power” is waning even more and what you can do to keep yourself safe.
Meta is deleting a lot of people – but what’s new?
Meta, censoring people?
Groundbreaking!
The fact that Zuck’s platforms are very trigger happy when it comes to bodies, sex, sex work and queerness shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone posting this kind of content – and it has been a topic of my research since time immemorial. In case you haven’t read this blog before, it was here that Instagram’s apology to pole dancers about shadowbanning was first published in 2019, and it was here that I published a post detailing how, post-new Terms of Use in 2020, things were only gonna get worse.
Fast forward to 2025, and although it gives me no pleasure to say this, things have gotten worse.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you also know that the combination of my research findings and the creation of a petition with over 120,000 signatures (as well as the general awareness that I’m a messy bitch when I’m censored) has meant that Meta workers, sometimes, speak to me either for knowledge exchange about policies that they don’t change, to provide more insights about their rules or just to expedite an appeals system that my participants have called “dysfunctional“.
And while this has, sometimes, meant the recovery of small and big accounts from the void, it’s not a foolproof way of helping people – and in 2023 I got so overwhelmed about requests for help that were going unanswered by my contacts that I had to create a spreadsheet about it. That purge of accounts led my agent to create the #StopDeletingUs campaign with the London kink, SW and Queer community.
Since then, it’s been going even more downhill (yes, really).
Maintaining relationships with Meta contacts is becoming increasingly challenging. Already, in my initial interactions, Meta had the upper hand in deciding when and whom to help, but since they invited me to a workshop to share my expertise on their nudity, sexual activity and sexual solicitation policies in 2022 our relationship had become more or less stable.
I could expect a reply fairly swiftly, and even if it was negative (i.e., we can’t help this user), they would explain why in their view that person had violated community guidelines. I could disagree, but I at least understood their reasoning – and they’d be polite enough to reply.
Since then, my points of contact have changed at least five times, and finding new ones is always labour intensive.
The contacts I do have sometimes ghost me for months, and when they do help restore accounts or tell me they can’t be recovered, they provide no explanation about why. Don’t get me wrong: as a critical outsider, of course keeping me happy is not their priority – and there are thousands lobbies, researchers, politicians, and just… people with competing priorities to our communities’, meaning that it’s challenging for Meta to please everybody.
But when you become such a staple of people’s digital and offline lives without scrutiny, and when your infrastructure doesn’t work, then we, as a society, have a problem.
And now, even the more direct ways in which I could supplement an appeals system that doesn’t really work for a fraction of our communities seems gone.
To give you an idea: my last meaningful interaction with them, where they promised to look into the deletion of a well-known performer and competition organiser as well as the deletion of all her competition accounts, was on October 29. I had emailed the week before, and had to chase as the contact was on holiday (which is fair enough). But their next reply was on November 20th – almost a month later – essentially saying they were glad some accounts were back (with no insights on whether that was thanks to them) and that they will let me know more if they found out what happened. Essentially, thanks for nothing.
As you can see, the relationship is degenerating, and I don’t think it’s my fault.
I think this is by design.
Meta no longer has the political will to help
Look, do I think Meta rue the day they answered my first email in 2019? Yes, I do.
Do I also think they used to value my research expertise and community mediation? For a while, I think they did – or they wouldn’t have let me into their HQ, even though I protested outside of them in stripper shoes with a bunch of sex workers.
But now, things have changed.
Together with the other tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of the 2024 United States election campaign cosying up to Donald Trump, promising to change his platforms in ways that would allow him to thrive under the obvious winner without further regulation. When Trump inevitably won, Zuck removed fact-checking from the US version of Meta, and started actioning a series of policy changes that would discriminate against LGBTQIA+ users, in line with the POTUS’ new executive orders. In short, marginalised communities and truth as a whole will no longer be protected by anti-hate and anti-misinformation policies… but of course they would continue to be affected by censorship, as Zuck, bolstered by a new aesthetic made of tight t-shirts and neck chains, pursues a “more masculine” energy on Meta, as he announced to none other than Joe Rogan.
If, when Meta worked under a supposedly progressive (although still very much flawed) presidency, Zuckerberg at least pretended to care about marginalised communities and about the PR damage that would ensue from not protecting them, that seems now gone with Trump in the White House. And in fact, it’s creating a whole US vs European Union tech regulation battle, where the tech barons align themselves with conservatives, increasingly far-right policies in the US and abroad for the mere objective of preventing more regulation curtailing their power and earning more and more money.
Catch me discuss some of these changes from minute 19 of this podcast onwards, on the back of several high-profile deletions in the UK and EU events scene, as reported by Maedb Joy and Repro Uncensored.
So geopolitics aside, how does that affect your content, and my intermediary role? Simple: while more of us get censored, my power to get those removals reviewed and appeals expedited is essentially almost close to zero. Which means that, first things first, you have to protect yourself.
What can you do to protect yourself?
As I explained in a recent reel, these are the three things that, according to what I’ve seen recently and to the teeny tiny tidbits of information I’ve been able to gather from Meta in the past year or so, are getting people in sex-positive communities deleted. These deletions have happened, I believe, on the back of algorithmic over-enforcement – and even if you follow community guidelines, you may be exposed to them.
1) LINKS
Meta’s Implicit Solicitation Policy means that the combination of a “suggestive element” with an offer for communication (a.k.a. “link in bio” or “hit me up in DM”) may be read as you implicitly soliciting. We wouldn’t want people to earn money from adult content, right?
You may think it doesn’t affect you, but Meta’s idea of a suggestive element is extremely conservative *and* opaque meaning that I’ve seen news content, people selling tickets to events, educational accounts being removed because of this. So TO BE SAFE if you’re sharing a link PLEASE be incredibly careful about the content you pair it with! I think this is why a lot of sex party organisers got deleted overnight in 2023 so if you’re selling tickets in particular be mindful.
2) MAKING MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS WITH SIMILAR HANDLES
Maybe you offer exercise classes and then want create a retreat or an event under the same brand name. No-brainer, right?
Well, I’ve seen people doing that – and especially creating lots of accounts with similar names within a very short period of time – and getting deleted for suspected inauthentic activity or impersonation. And if you notice, every now and then your Instagram notifications will tell you that IG “found accounts with a similar username to yours,” so they are cracking down on this and, on top of that, if a rival decides to exploit this notification to report you, you can come under extra scrutiny – see my work on malicious flagging here.
So be careful and, in particular, be VERY careful about the emails you pair these new accounts with because if they’re all under the same email the same might happen. So if you’re creating something new, consider doing that from a browser, maybe with a different email and from a different IP address so a different location (say, a café).
3) SPICY HANDLES
This one really sucks, but I’m seeing a lot of people who have handles with terms that are too naughty for Meta getting deleted a lot these days. So please be careful with your account name, and even with algospeak – machine learning learns how you change your words to avoid detection, so don’t consider doing that a safe bet.
What can you do if you get deleted?
Given everything I’ve just written, can I still help you?
Maybe. I don’t know, it’s not an exact science and it definitely doesn’t get any more likely that I’ll help if you send me multiple messages.
I DON’T WORK FOR META, which means my power is very limited. I do this for free – and you should in fact be extremely wary of people that offer to recover your deleted accounts for a fee (which many of my participants have done in desperation, with no guarantee it’d work) – because chances are they are in my same position. Maybe they have some contacts inside and they depend on how/whether they want to reply – so don’t trust them. But pretty please, don’t write to me multiple times, or send friends to my DMs, because as a precarious researcher on the job market I’m overwhelmed as it is.
Instead, consider filling out (or telling your friends to fill out) this form, which I’ve created anew because the previous one wasn’t reducing my admin. I check this weekly, and send info from it to Meta weekly. BUT whether they reply is up to them, which means that if I have updates or need more info you will hear from me. If I am not in touch, or if nothing changes, you know why.
How about the future of this weird mediation?
When it comes to censorship, we may agree or disagree about what content should stay up on platforms. But what’s concerning here is seeing accounts that haven’t broken policies be censored, with no one to turn to in order to resolve this – be it Meta’s own appeals or contacts within the platform. And even if they did break policies, the least platforms can do is provide more education about why instead of a boiler plate regurgitation of community guidelines, in order to educate the user.
None of this happens of course.
Now, with these changes in my interactions with Meta workers – once a glimmer of hope for these over-censored communities who didn’t have access to an explanation – the frustration and broken trust that arise from them and the very little changes I’m seeing are making me reconsider how much I keep in touch with them. Already in many an activist and NGO workshop, several activists and experts I admire told me they’ve stopped engaging with Meta because they find this engagement performative and not conducive to change, which really needs regulation to compel platforms to be transparent and fair.
I tend to agree.
And while in the past, engaging with Meta was really meaningful to me because if I could help even one person recover the account they used to work and network, that was already a huge deal, now this has changed. Not because I don’t value that 1-1 help, but because the roadblocks towards it, and the sheer absence of political will or respect towards my time and expertise make me feel like this knowledge exchange isn’t where I want to spend my energies.
It seems that bad press – as found by research by Marchal et al. in 2024 – is currently our only hope to push for changes in policy or a reversal of decisions, which brings me to the next point.
A tally of account deletions
I want to leave you with a list of the accounts that have been flagged in recent times, collected by Repro Uncensored, to show you the scale of these removals and – in case you are a journalist or someone with more leverage than me – in case you can get Meta to review them cause I’m not getting any luck.
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