I downloaded Instagram to talk with some of my foreign friends. I decided to peruse what sort of left-wing space it had, expecting the standard Reddit-esque reactionary anti-communism. Instead, I found a sea of ultra/leftcom nonsense: hundreds of posts and comments of phrase-mongering and dogmatic nonsense, not to mention gross misunderstandings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, as well as either entirely ignoring or looking down on modern work such as that done by Chinese scholars.
Is there something specific about Instagram or its target user base that has led to fostering this community in ways other Western platforms have not? As it seems far more prevalent than on any other platform I’ve seen.
Because Instagram censors, shadow-bans and algorithmically supresses pro-palestinian content. Since anti-imperialist leftist were the first to condem the genocide, they have been made invisible on the platform. Ultra-left are compatible leftist, who don’t threaten the empire. That’s why they are left over on the platform, even, if some of them now too state the obvious about the genocide.
In general, censorship of anti-imperialism and promotion of the compatible left has been going on across platforms and media and around many issues for a long time.
I’m sure, this exists too on Instagram. It’s probably just your algorithm, that shows you leftcom content instead.
OP is stuck with “Down with Gazan imperialism” leftcoms.
Wow, they really try the same playbook every time. Everyone who stands up to the empire is themselves imperialist, so why even support or do anything?
IG has heavy censorship around Israel. My org still getting posts removed for this. I’m not involved in that at all, so unfortunately can’t share any specifics beyond that.
And they probably make the posts they didn’t remove hard to find for people too.
I’m sure it does I was just surprised there was enough leftcom nonsense to feed the algorithm to have it push that niche over the generic anti-communism.