Instagram hates us.
Instagram has shut down Girl Alliance's Instagram account TWICE. They deactivated us with NO WARNING on January 20, 2018 and again on February 25 because our Instagram page contained “sexually explicit” content and messaging. (This was likely done by Instagram's automated bots looking for and annihilating sites containing phrases like "send nudes," regardless of context.)
This is ridiculous, of course, because Girl Alliance actually promotes the OPPOSITE: healthy and safe relationships for teens. In fact, the Girl Alliance founder spoke about her business at SXSWedu in March 2018, and an article about Girl Alliance is featured on the NextGen website.
Each time our Instagram account was deactivated, we lost valuable content and many fabulous followers. We have appealed to Instagram and even tweeted to Instagram founder @kevin, but it is not looking good. Really, it is ironic that a company so brazenly mistreats the very teen consumers they depend on.
We are a by teens for teens business. While we still use social media, we are going to most importantly beef up our presence through good old-fashioned face to face activism!