The Things They Delete

Instagram will delete your breast but let a screed about purifying the race sit there for six weeks. Facebook has entire teams moderating nakedness while hate speech multiplies faster than they can delete it. There’s no incompetence here, no accident—they’ve decided which kinds of human expression are profitable and which ones make the advertisers nervous. Violence doesn’t scare sponsors. Skin does.

So a show called Uncensored Berlin happened with twenty-six artists who’ve all been shadowbanned or deleted for the crime of depicting the human body. The curator, Frank Schröder, said it was one of the most creatively fulfilling projects he’d worked on. Which makes sense. When you’re not worried about deletion, you make different work.

The pieces ranged from crude to elegant, obscene to playful. Some artists were subtle about the nudity, some were not. What they had in common was that every single one of them would be flagged by Instagram’s algorithm in minutes. Which meant the whole exhibition, hanging safely in a gallery in Kreuzberg, was basically an indictment by absence.

There’s something clarifying about seeing work that a corporation has deemed unacceptable. It makes obvious what those platforms are actually defending: a very particular vision of cleanliness, of which bodies get to be visible, of what desire looks like when it’s been smoothed down to advertising-friendly terms. They’re not protecting anyone except advertiser peace of mind. And a room full of deleted work says that out loud.

You could buy the prints and take them home. Hang them somewhere no algorithm gets a vote.