Fifteen minutes into her shoot with model Nyome Nicholas-Williams, photographer Alexandra Cameron knew she had captured the perfect image: a dreamy split second with Nicholas-Williams bathed under natural light, her eyes closed and arms wrapped around her breasts. The response on Instagram was ecstatic: “stunning … beautiful … this should be in a gallery!”. But within hours, Instagram had deleted the photo and Nicholas-Williams had been warned her account could be shut down.“Millions of pictures of very naked, skinny white women can be found on Instagram every day,” said Nicholas-Williams. “But a fat black woman celebrating her body is banned? It was shocking to me. I feel like I’m being silenced.”Her followers rallied. Hundreds of users fought the platform last week to share the censored photos of Nicholas-Williams under the hashtag #IwanttoseeNyome, while Cameron accused Instagram of a disconnect between its positive statements over Black Lives Matter and the apparent unfair targeting of its black content creators. The platform, with over a billion users and 15,000 people working around the world to review posts and look for banned material, has been repeatedly accused of discriminating against black people. In June CEO Adam Mosseri acknowledged the need for Instagram to look at “algorithmic bias” and said that he was “hearing concerns about whether we suppress black voices and whether our products and policies treat everyone equally”. In a blogpost he wrote: “Words are not enough. That’s why we’re committed to looking at the ways our policies, tools and processes impact black people and other under-represented groups on Instagram.”A month later, Vishal Shah, the company’s vice-president of product, announced that an internal equity team would be rooting out “any bias in our systems and policies”, and the platform launched its #ShareBlackStories campaign to promote black voices.

All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/09/instagrams-censorship-of-black-models-photo-shoot-reignites-claims-of-race-bias-nyome-nicholas-williams


#black #localnewssandiego #newsadvance #news #nytimes #cnn #newsnow