One of the most widely-used photo social media site, Instagram, temporarily banned the account of a popular female photographer.
The authorities of the site took the move because they possibly felt that her posts were obscene in nature, though they later claimed t was a mistake.
Queensland photographer, Melissa Jean Wilbraham, created the MelissaJeanBabies Instagram page where she often shared intimate photos of herself ranging from pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.
But some persons were of the view that the timing for the action from Instagram couldn’t have been worse as t was exactly on the first day of World Breastfeeding Week (August 1-7).
When she tried to log into the page over the weekend, she received a message that read: “Your account has been deleted for not following our terms. We’re unable to restore accounts that are deleted for these types of violations.”
Wilbraham who also runs her own business and works as a photographer for the Sunshine Coast Hospital, said: “It was like being punished for celebrating the miracle of life.”
However, friends and followers of the photographers launched a campaign which yielded a positive result as the page was restored later and she even gained around 4,000 followers.
The rules of the social media site stipulate that users must not post ‘violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content’.
Wilbraham wrote on Facebook: “How ironic that the very day ‘World Breastfeeding Week’ began, my business was removed from Instagram. There will always be sad humans who report my images but I will NEVER let this stop me celebrating & normalizing the miracle of life [heart emoticon] #bringbackmelissajeanbabies #bringbackmelissajean.’
However, after receiving an ‘overwhelming’ response to her request to be reinstated, Wilbraham stated that the experience has only made her more passionate about what she does.
She said: “I’m actually grateful for the haters because without them none of this would have happened. Having people oppose my work has attracted so much attention.
“Going forward I’m more passionate about it than ever, I’m definitely not going to allow the negatively to make me conform to what they want.”
Instagram tendered an apology after reinstating the account, claiming that the account was not removed intentionally.
The full statement from a spokesperson of Instagram read:
‘We allow photos of breastfeeding on Instagram. We looked into what happened here, and this was a pure mistake that we’ve now rectified.
For context, our teams review content when it’s reported to us for violating our Community Guidelines.
They review millions of pieces of content daily – and as much as we’d like to be free of mistakes, we do make them. We are sorry that this happened, but we use cases like this to learn and improve. We have reached out to @melissajeanbabies and apologised for our mistake.”
Check out some of the photos below. (Click on any image to enlarge).
