Instagram is removing beer photos from brewery pages, and refusing to explain why

I hate to read that. IMO, censorship is bad. People need to be responsible for verifying the accuracy and validity of what they read and hear instead of punting that responsibility to a bunch of faceless/nameless censors who masquerade as "fact-checkers" who claim to provide a service and help keep us "safe" from offensive information. "Facts" evolve. What is controversial today becomes well accepted fact in the future. Ask Galileo. In his day the fact checkers would have prohibited written views about the earth revolving around the sun.

 

have yet to experience this at bierkeller. will watch out for it tho. thx for the heads up

 

Is Meta censoring other forms of alcohol and weed on the Instagram platform?

How frequently is Meta removing photos?

I don't follow a lot of beer accounts, but don't recall any posts disappearing so far. Meanwhile, I see several weed ads despite it being illegal in my state and at a federal level (and those accounts aren't weed related.)

 

Do you have any examples? I'm not registering to read the article in the OP.

 

Well they did, or worse….much much worse. Ask Giordano Bruno.

 

"Community standards" are a smoke screen to allow Zuckerberg to censor at his whim. He's a petty tyrant.

 

Oddly enough I’ve never been much at odd with FB/Meta despite getting a time or two a warning for tossing a crack to a friend of mine, which is according to their “mods”; bullying and harassment. “violate the community standards” yeah right, spoken like a true believing commissar of the USSR.

Also, I don’t even engage in politics or pandemic debates over there, as everybody is either an epidemiologist or an antivaxxer.

 

It's a UK article so the mentioned breweries are there as well. Northern Monk, Seven Brothers and the Verdant Brewing Company were cited as examples in the article.

 

The article cited several examples, all in England, of their posts being deleted. One brewery stated that because of the COVID lockdown, their sole source of income was through their web store, but the Instagram deletion of their posts seriously jeopardized this.

Anyway, you can probably read the link if any web browser you use has a 'private window' feature. E.g., if using Firefox, right click on the link and select "Open In New Private Window".

 

Another reason why I’ve never been on Instagram, Twitter, TicToc or Facebook. Well I get on my wife’s account to look at Facebook Markets from time to time but very rare. I’m on LinkedIn and wish I didn’t have to but owner of company I work for requires it for marketing reasons. I’m addicted to YouTube over cable TV shows, but only go on without an account. Still get algorithms working to steer recommendations my way so I get what I need without being tracked (probably still being tracked I’m sure).

 

You are tracked, your content harvested, and your preferences tracked every time you use anything from Alphabet (Google, Youtube, gmail, etc.), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and most other "free" web services. Unless you use a VPN, even your ISP can (and many do) track you. (Many may not realize it, but gmail harvests your supposedly private emails as well.)

To everyone as a public service:
No-tracking web search service: DuckDuckGo
No-tracking, no harvesting (encryption possible) email service: Tutanota

Every time you click on anything from Alphabet or Meta you put money in their pockets whether you have an account or not.

 

Here's the article with the paywall removed
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www...-brewery-beer-craft-pages-rules-b1971506.html

 

The UK has some specific rules regarding alcohol ads on social media

I wonder if IG thinks the images are violating one of these?

 

DuckDuckGo is a great, but sometimes frustrating, mobile browser, Vivaldi for computer browser. Duck also runs a mail forwarding service (yourname@duck.com) which strips trackers before forwarding to your real address.

 

My best guess after reading the article is that there are just too many breweries with too many names and marketing imagery and like so many other things banned from social media platforms in the last few years there is concern that a lot of the content may not be towing the line. So the quick fix is to ban all, review, and then let back in the allowable content as chosen by the social media platform (or the puppetmaster controlling them). Seems to be how things are going lately.

 

I've seen this as well. More than a few times I've looked at a port from a Brewery - usually about a release. Then its gone, then the Brewery re posts saying " we don't know what happened " Its sad.

 

This is interesting. I only use Instagram to follow breweries and local stores and I have not seen any photos removed.

On a side note, I denied Instagram access to anything on my phone, but Instagram has suggested I follow everyone in my contact list.

 

At least as of now, it isn't looking like it's affecting Bell's account (plenty of photos with beer in them).

 

Yea they sho did.

This is good news.

It will kill off all the parasites that hoard bottles and only visit a brewery once a year to resell. Only those who really support a brewery will now visit.

It will also get ridif those corny pages of people in instagram that post photos of all the whales they've acquired.

 

Also forgot to add, this will ultimately bring more people to BA .

 

And being replaced by girls dancing.

 

Maybe this is why @Untappdwtf got banned a few months ago? Either way he's back with a new account, @Pilsnerish, which is still very amusing, I suggest you follow him for some beer cringe

 

Agree with this mostly. However, theories evolve, real facts do not.

 

A forum like Instagram (or BA, Twitter, Facebook, Cable TV outlet, newspaper) may want to maintain its own standards, and can restrict what is said. The "victim" of this kind of censorship can express his/her opinion/fact elsewhere (blog, podcast, etc.). Depending on the distribution method or legal jurisdiction, the owner of the forum could be subject to libel/slander suits. To my mind it's OK if Instagram decides to limit the images. They are generally just advertising/promotion. But it's not the most useful decision either. Government censorship is a more important issue.

 

This is a really odd situation, because I highly doubt that Meta wants this outcome. I'm sure they love that small businesses rely on Insta and similar to advertise. I know Zuck acts in bad faith with consistency and think that they're one of the more harmful new entities of the century... but I have no clue what the rationale would be behind doing this purposefully, and it'll hurt their bottom line if it becomes bad enough, so I have to assume it's just a "using too big of a hammer for a nuanced situation" problem that'll get worked out soon.

 

A recent-ish example I've seen from Off Color here in Chicago

The photo in question is a 4pk of this beer

 

Yep just have a scantily clad girl holding the beer, dancing with it, posting a lame motivational quote caption, etc., and IG will allow it.

 

Agree this phenomenon is weird/outrageous and actually kinda funny--- but I'd like to point out that all member posted photos will eventually be removed from BA -- not due to unexplained community guidelines but due to third party hosting and continued/unpredictable host turnover. Does anybody care about that?

 

I'm not here to start a huge political fight, but if 2020 taught us anything, it's that a huge percentage of our population is not capable of "verifying the accuracy and validity of what they read and hear." That's hilarious, sorry.

 

Maybe the labels were reported for being off color?

 

One of my local breweries, Line Creek Brewing in Atlanta just complained about this! They had a post of the latest beer release flagged by IG. WTH? Since when does that violate their standards?

 

I wonder if Twitter is next with brewers photos? Twitter bans suspends deletes / censors anything they deem not fitting guidelines.

 

BA riffing on another entity's censorship that doesn't match up with guidelines.

This is an Onion article right?

 

Line Creek Brewing Atlanta just did last week I think.