Maybe getting my Instagram disabled was not so bad after all...

If you follow me on Instagram, you probably know that my account got disabled a few weeks ago, on 26th November, 2020. This happened right after I announced that I would be taking a social media break. It was a difficult situation for me, especially since I lost all the content, along with the community of people I had built using that account. I asked people who followed me on my backup and my friends to report this problem to Instagram. Long story short, a few days after that, on 10th December, 2020 I got my account back.

You’re probably wondering what the point of this newsletter is and why I am telling you all this when I already have my account back, but trust me, I do have a point. While I was using my back up account, I went live on Instagram to interact with the people who follow me and to make myself feel a little bit better about losing my main account. While I was live, a follower commented asking me how it feels to go from 3000 followers to 300, and to my own surprise? It actually did not feel bad at all. In fact, I felt so much better and lighter now that I was not being perceived by thousands of people. I felt so much more free now that barely a 100 people were watching my story. I felt … normal again?

I realised the reason why this happened was probably because I no longer felt the need to have an opinion and put it out for thousands of followers to see. Online activism or Instagram activism may look easy, but it is exhausting and sure takes a toll on one’s mental health. You’re constantly on your toes looking for information that needs to be shared, fundraisers that need to be amplified, opinions that need to be written and posted. People are constantly reaching out to you to ask you what you think of a certain situation or person or topic. This is very, very different from the on ground work I do to organize and protest. In fact, on ground activism is more rewarding than whatever I do online, and it still does not tire me the way Instagram does.

The thing with online activism is that once you put your opinion on one thing out there, you’re expected to have an opinion on every single thing. It does not matter if you don't know about certain topics or if it isn’t your place to have an opinion on something, or that your opinion simply does not matter and is inconsequential- if you’re running a so called “activist page” on Instagram, you must have an opinion on everything. If you don’t know about something enough to have an opinion, well, why don’t you? The internet does not care if it’s not your place to voice your opinion or if you feel like talking about an issue would be taking up space that isn’t yours to take or speaking over another marginalized group.

And that’s probably why getting my Instagram disabled felt so liberating- I no longer felt the need to have an opinion on every single thing. I did not feel the immense pressure of making my thoughts known to the internet, nor did the internet feel entitled to ask me for my thoughts. At least for those fleeting few days.

I now have my account back and thankfully, the constant feeling to have something to say and make my opinion known to people has disappeared. I no longer feel pressured to say something or create content out of situations. I guess, I did get a break from my Instagram and it worked out well for me.

This newsletter was written back in 2020. The reason I am sharing it again is because my Instagram was taken down again. This time, the reason was a reel I posted about the hijab ban which made some right wingers really angry. The same reel was reposted multiple times by a right wing page. I suspect there were numerous attempts to hack into my account by the same person. Naturally, Instagram logged me out of my account due to "suspicious activity" and all my appeals have gone unheard. I refuse to be a slave to the algorithm. This is why I am moving to my other Instagram account and have set up this stck.me account. Even if I do get @bigmouthaiman back, I will permanently delete it after backing up my content. My feelings about Instagram remain the same. I will be focusing on platforms like YouTube who actually care about creators and have community guidelines to protect them, as opposed to protecting trolls hell bent on harassing others.