The Summer Instagram Hid Pole Dancing: Inside the 2019 Hashtag Ban

In July 2019, pole dancers opened Instagram and found their hashtags empty. Years of tricks, combos and competition clips tagged #poledancing had disappeared from view overnight, replaced by a note about community guidelines. What followed was a petition, a corporate apology, a worldwide day of action, and a debate about who gets to be seen online that still hasn’t really ended.

The backstory: Instagram’s “inappropriate content” rule

To understand what happened, you have to go back a few months. In April 2019, Instagram announced it would start limiting posts it considered “inappropriate” from its Explore and hashtag pages, even when those posts didn’t break its community guidelines.¹ Nothing would be deleted. It just wouldn’t be shown to anyone who wasn’t already following you.

Users had a name for that kind of quiet invisibility: the shadowban. Pole dancer and researcher Carolina Are later described it in an academic paper as “a form of light and secret censorship” aimed at content the platform considers borderline.² Pole, with its shorts, sports bras, heels and upside-down splits, was always going to be close to whatever line Instagram drew.

Strippers had already been through a version of this. In 2018, #stripper and #yesastripper stopped working as hashtags while #poledance stayed active. Instagram’s statement at the time said #stripper “can again be used and seen by the community in the spirit in which they are intended,” which, as MEL Magazine pointed out, didn’t really explain much.³ In 2019, it was pole fitness’s turn.

July 19, 2019: the hashtags go dark

Starting on July 19, 2019, posts that pole dancers around the world had collected under tags like #poledancing, #poledancer and #polesportorg were wiped from the hashtag pages. California pole performer Elizabeth Blanchard counted 19 banned hashtags in a Facebook post.¹ Even technical tags named after tricks, like #pddeadlift and #pdayesha, were hit, along with #polefitness. Click one, and instead of posts you got a message saying recent posts were hidden because they contained content that “may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines.”⁴

Think about what that meant in practice. A deadlift is a strength move. An Ayesha is an inverted hold. Neither is remotely sexual, but the tags were treated as if they were.

“I felt that our community is in danger and under attack,” Sweden-based instructor Anna-Maija Nyman told Yahoo Lifestyle. Blanchard said the pattern was “hard to mistake as being targeted towards pole dancers.”¹

The petition

On July 20, the day after the hashtags vanished, pole dancer Rachel Osborne started a Change.org petition titled “Instagram, please stop censoring pole dance.” It argued that pole content was “not profane, pornographic, injurious or hateful,” and asked Instagram to “review your algorithm and settings.”⁵

It spread fast. Within a week it had more than 12,000 signatures, and some of the biggest names and organizations in pole were behind it: United Pole Artists, Pole Dance Nation (founded by Nikki St. John) and Pole Dancers Vote (founded by studio owner Laura Arbios).⁴ It eventually passed 18,000 signatures.⁵

The statements from the organizers were blunt:

• United Pole Artists’ Annemarie Davies: “Instagram needs to update their algorithms – stop hiding pole hashtags.”
• Australian instructor Michelle Shimmy: “This policing of women’s bodies is not okay.”
• Nikki St. John of Pole Dance Nation: “It’s an unfair double standard.”⁴

That “double standard” point came up again and again. Davies told Yahoo it was “obvious discrimination,” pointing out that the pole industry is roughly 80 percent female. Shimmy said it felt “like we’re being punished for living in female bodies.”¹

The apology

At first, Instagram denied it was targeting pole at all.⁶ Then, as the petition grew and the story was picked up by the press, it changed its tune. A spokesperson for Facebook, which owned Instagram, said hashtags including #poledancing and #poledancenation “were restricted in error, and we have restored them to full visibility.” The statement added: “it is never our intention to silence members of our community.”¹

“It is never our intention to silence members of our community.”

Facebook spokesperson, 2019

So that was that? Not quite. “In error” is a very tidy explanation for 19 hashtags going dark at the same time. The apology fixed the hashtags. It didn’t explain how they’d been picked, or promise it wouldn’t happen again.

Business, not just vanity

It’s easy to think of this as people being annoyed their trick videos weren’t getting likes. It was more serious than that. By 2019, Instagram was how a lot of pole teachers, studios and small brands found customers.

Atlanta-based exotic dancer Nikki St. John said her reach “dropped dramatically” once her hashtags disappeared, which hit her income as a small business owner. Michelle Shimmy said the restrictions hurt both her Sydney studio and her pole-wear brand.¹ When your hashtags are your shop window, being hidden from them isn’t a minor annoyance.

October 29: #EveryBODYVisible

The pole community didn’t stop at the apology. On October 29, 2019, International Internet Day, a coalition of activists launched #EveryBODYVisible, a global day of action that grew directly out of the pole petition. The campaign website was led by United Pole Artists founder AM (Annemarie) Davies, and the coalition reached well beyond pole: women, LGBTQ+ people, People of Color, sex workers, photographers, artists, plus-size and body-positive creators, disability activists, sex educators and fitness professionals.⁷

Its demands were simple enough: more clarity and transparency about moderation, a proper dialogue with the people affected, and an end to unexplained account deletions, hashtag bans and shadowbanning. Participants posted with the hashtag and tagged Instagram’s executives directly.⁷

“Every body deserves to be seen, heard and made to feel visible.”

AM Davies, United Pole Artists

The gender-switch workaround

The strangest chapter came that November. HuffPost reported that some female pole dancers, fitness instructors and sex workers had started switching the gender on their Instagram profiles to male, hoping it would restore their reach. One Australian pole performer said her posts reached more people within three days of making the switch.⁶

Facebook flatly denied there was any connection: “Gender information from profiles has no impact on content we filter from hashtags or the Explore page,” a spokesperson said. Carolina, a London-based researcher of online content moderation and a founding member of the @everybodyvisible account, called the situation “really upsetting and ridiculous.”⁶ Whether the trick actually worked or was just a coincidence, the fact that women felt they had to try it says a lot about how much trust had been lost.

Why the story still matters

The 2019 ban became a reference point in research on how platforms moderate women’s bodies. Carolina Are’s paper uses her own experience as a pole dancer on Instagram to examine exactly this kind of quiet, unexplained restriction.²

It also changed how a lot of pole dancers think about social media. If you teach, run a studio or sell anything, it’s a reminder not to build your whole business on a platform that can turn your visibility down without telling you. Keep your own mailing list, back up your videos, and spread yourself across more than one app. Our guide to growing a pole dancing Instagram account is still useful, but treat Instagram as a shop window, not the whole shop.

More pole drama deep dives

This is part of our look back at the arguments that shaped the online pole community. Read about the Facebook post that called the spatchcock “ugly”, and the #NotAStripper vs. #YesAStripper hashtag fight.

Sources

1. Kerry Justich, “Pole dancer says Instagram is censoring ‘dirty and inappropriate’ photos: Our community is ‘under attack’”, Yahoo Lifestyle, updated August 7, 2019. Covers the April 2019 policy and the July hashtag restrictions. ↩︎
2. Carolina Are, “The Shadowban Cycle: an autoethnography of pole dancing, nudity and censorship on Instagram”, Feminist Media Studies 22, no. 8 (2022): 2002–2019. ↩︎
3. Tierney Finster, “Instagram’s Shadowban on #Strippers”, MEL Magazine, June 6, 2018. ↩︎
4. “International Pole Dance Organizations Launch Change.org Petition”, BroadwayWorld, July 26, 2019. ↩︎
5. Rachel Osborne, “Instagram, please stop censoring pole dance”, Change.org, started July 20, 2019. ↩︎
6. Jesselyn Cook, “Women Are Pretending To Be Men On Instagram To Avoid Sexist Censorship”, HuffPost (republished by Yahoo News), November 19, 2019. ↩︎
7. “Thousands Around the World Protest Instagram to Make #EveryBODYVisible on October 29 International Internet Day”, CommPRO, October 2019. ↩︎