Shibari is a consensual artistic practice rooted in trust, presence, and connection. For many of us, it is not just visual content — it is a safe place, a vocation, and a central part of our creative and philosophical work.

Yet Instagram’s moderation systems repeatedly misclassify shibari and rope art as violence or sexual content.

What the platform treats as something dangerous or inappropriate is, for our community, a space built on consent, care, and mutual respect.

Because of this misunderstanding, artists, models, and educators regularly face content removals, shadow bans, and account restrictions. These decisions are often automated and opaque, with no real consideration for context or intention. The result is concrete harm: reduced visibility, damaged reputations, lost income, and weakened creative communities.

Instagram has become essential for artists to share their work and connect with audiences. However, its current policies fail to distinguish consensual rope art from harmful content, effectively silencing an entire form of expression.

Shibari is not violence. It is not pornography. It is a practice grounded in awareness and responsibility. Treating it as inherently dangerous erases the lived experiences of those who engage in it with care.

We call on Instagram (Meta) to revise its moderation policies and clearly distinguish consensual artistic expression from violence or pornography. We ask for transparent, informed, and fair guidelines that protect creators instead of punishing them.

This is about freedom of expression, artistic research, and communities built on consent being allowed to exist without constant threat from algorithms.

Sign this petition to demand that Meta stop censoring shibari and rope art, and start respecting creative practices rooted in care, consent, and connection.

When Algorithms Decide What Is Violence

Most content is not removed because it is illegal, but because it violates Meta’s internal guidelines — and the vast majority of these decisions are made by automated systems. Every lived experience, emotion, or artistic practice is judged by a generic artificial mechanism incapable of understanding context, consent, or intention. Even when users appeal, a significant percentage of content is later found to have been removed incorrectly: in independent analyses (for example on Facebook), around 44% of appealed removals were overturned — suggesting similar systemic issues on Instagram.

At the same time, these systems consistently fail to recognize real violence. On Instagram, “violence” is often reduced to a misinterpreted image or visual symbol, while hate speech, incitement, and other forms of actual harm frequently go unnoticed. The result is a paradox: consensual artistic practices are censored, while genuinely damaging content remains online.

This shows that the problem is not only technical, but cultural. We need to rethink how violence is defined — not as nudity or bodily tension, but as what denies dignity, consent, and humanity. As long as moderation relies on superficial image recognition, art will continue to be punished instead of real abuse.