Infinity Mirrors, Bypassing Shadowbans and How Instagram Became a News App
Words: Hannah Cobb
Make it stand out
In late 2023 a friend DM’d me a screenshot of a create-mode Instagram story with default-font white text on a black background which proclaimed: “instagram is a news app”. The meme felt like the perfect summation of what I’d been observing on my feed for years. In a time of live-streamed genocide, limitation of political content by Meta and dwindling public trust in legacy media, it’s obvious why users are attempting to construct their own ecosystems of information exchange within the restrictive architecture of capitalist cyberspace.
Since its launch in 2010, Instagram’s mission statement has been “To capture and share the world’s moments.” Originally this meant capturing and sharing a 1:1 ratio, filtered snap of a puppy. In 2024, however, it has come to mean something quite different. For those of us not struggling through shadow bans, the mission statement now evokes images and videos of mutilated bodies and decimated landscapes. In 2024, the feed shows us a thirst-trap, then a child’s bloodied hand under rubble, then interior design inspo. It is an incoherent, frenetic landscape far removed from the (liberal) pastoral simplicity of Instagram’s original promise. How are we to make sense of a world where unfathomable live-streamed horrors are paralleled with content that reflects our desires as consumers?
Writing in Real Review last year, Sham Jaff, a journalist and founder of the online news source what happened last week recounted her experiences growing up in Germany as a Kurdish refugee in the aftermath of 9/11. In the text, titled Beyond the Western Gaze, Jaff documents her realisation that “the news isn’t universal, it’s a mosaic of perspectives, a local dialect spoken in many tongues.”
She continues “…If the news was a curated gallery of events, I decided to become a curator myself.” And so, what happened last week became a weekly aggregation of news items curated by Jaff, updating readers on underrepresented events from Africa, Asia and the Americas.
In Western mainstream media, where accurate reporting on Israel’s bombardment of Palestine is glaringly sparse, Instagram has, through necessity, become a news app to me. My feed is populated by curated carousels of news headlines; infographics, screen-recorded reels from accounts on the ground, and real-time updates via Broadcast Channels. The feed now unravels as a non-linear news bulletin from myriad sources.
This is not the first time that social media has documented — and even shaped — current affairs. What is happening now can be situated in a 14-year timeline of major world events that are documented, mediated and effected by social networks. From mass demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, to the BLM marches in 2020 and the storming of the Capitol the following year, social networks have provided a digital infrastructure for IRL mobilisation. The 2016 Brexit referendum signified a notable shift in the consequences of social media within the democratic process. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users’ data was harvested without consent by Cambridge Analytica in order to produce targeted content, directly influencing voters’ decisions at the ballot.
Facebook––now Meta––bought Instagram in 2012. The tech giant’s content moderation has come under scrutiny recently for its explicit bias against anything it suspects to be pro-Palestinian. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch published a report exposing the “systemic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook.” Users posting keywords such as ‘Palestine’, ‘Gaza’, ’genocide’, or even an emoji of the Palestinian flag risked being shadowbanned or suspended. As a result of these restrictions, new forms of digital communication have begun to emerge.
One such phenomenon is the ‘Algo-break’, a name given to attempts at bypassing Meta’s censorial algorithm by punctuating stories and posts about Palestine with unrelated content. In another bid to slip under the radar of Meta’s panopticon-esque detection of offending keywords, users have adopted the language of ‘leetspeak’; a terminally-online form of written communication associated with gaming, in which certain letters in words (often vowels) are replaced with numbers or symbols. ‘Gaza’, for example, is written as ‘G*z*’or ‘G4z4’, and ‘Algo-break’ becomes ‘4lg0-br34k’. Sometimes letters are disposed of altogether: Palestine can be signified through the watermelon emoji.
Another pattern emerging is an effect in which a screenshot of a post –– inclusive of app interface features –– is re-posted multiple times by multiple accounts, to the extent that the feed begins to resemble an infinity mirror. As the images are replicated, the original post appears to move further and further into the distance. These optical tunnels, resembling underground networks extending deeper into the once-flat interface, grow more extensive with each reshare. In 1968, Hans Hollein wrote Everything is Architecture, positing that “Architecture is determination of space, environment. Architecture is [the] conditioning of a psychological state.”
To this end, we can begin to interpret the experience of Instagram as a palpably architectural one. The proliferation of aesthetics that are the direct result of bids to remain undetected point to a spatialisation of Instagram: to hide is a plainly spatial undertaking, and in the feed we are seeing labyrinthine corridors being constructed by users to bypass authoritarian restrictions, as horror after unspeakable horror are broadcast in real-time.
Speaking about his 2023 film The Zone of Interest, director Jonathan Glazer commented that through the seclusion of the garden wall separating the Höss family from neighbouring Auschwitz, the “genocide became ambient to their lives.” Throughout the film, we are intermittently reminded of the inconceivable horrors beyond the wall by the screams and gunshots underlying the film’s score. Close-up shots of flowers are soundtracked by routine slaughter. The wall provides a fallacy of disconnect; it becomes a buffer of atrocity offering the Höss family an illusion of their world as distinctly separate from the one behind it.
Writing recently for ArtReview about the role of protest posting (particularly regarding the morality of sharing images of brutalised Palestinians) Holly Connolly has suggested that “the camera becomes a kind of portal: [the men in the image] know that what they are being subjected to is not contained in a private present under the lone watch of the IDF forces”. For those of us using Instagram, watching as the image moves further away with each re-post, the screen is becoming a portal into a digital landscape undergoing mutations enacted by users resisting the illusion that this world is separate from the one broadcast to us real-time in the feed.
For updates on Palestine and information about protests, donations and direct action, I recommend following these Instagram accounts:
@letstalkpalestine (who offer daily updates via their Broadcast Channel)
Meta automatically limits political and social content. You can change this by going to Settings → Suggested content → Political content → ‘Don’t limit’