"If you wouldn't show the photo or video you are thinking about uploading to a child, or your boss, or your parents, you probably shouldn't share it on Instagram." As with the rest of Instagram's Community Guidelines, the familiar tone of this cautionary statement belies its swift and autocratic enforcement. A photo that violates the ban on "nudity or mature content" will get taken down, and the user will be served with either a perfunctory warning or a suspension of their account and content; sometimes, the person's account will be terminated entirely. Like Facebook, Instagram doesn't get into the messy business of distinguishing between pornography and nudity, art and smut. Their blanket ban on so-called "mature content," and the inconsistency in its enforcement, has users struggling to wade their way through a murky, finicky morality. Male nipples, the thong-clad asses that populate Dan Bilzerian's feed, and posts of Kim Kardashian's PAPER cover are allowed to stay, while female nipples, bare asses that don't belong to Kim Kardashian, and even a Blue Period Picasso risk tripping the censors.

The image-sharing app's censorship policies came under serious question earlier this year, after Instagram deleted artist Petra Collins' account for posting a photo of her clothed but unshaven bikini line. Collins raised hell, writing an essay on The Huffington Post that read, "I did nothing that violated the terms of use. No nudity, violence, pornography, unlawful, hateful or infringing imagery. What I did have was an image of MY body that didn't meet society's standard of 'femininity.'" Instagram had accidentally revealed some of the logic driving its censoring, and it wasn't pretty: the platform hadn't flagged nudity, but, rather, an iteration of the female body it wasn't used to seeing, or didn't want to see. Users grew suspicious of the conservative biases lurking behind the Community Guidelines, and accused Instagram of censoring nudity more aggressively than other types of banned content, like violence.

For young artists, social media presents a paradox: Instagram and Facebook are crucial for building a brand and a fan base, but they often force artists to tamper with the provocations that define their work. The six creatives we interviewed for this piece all had different takes on social media censorship, but they agreed on a few key points. All six praised the ease of use and wide reach of these platforms, and saw their careers (and in some cases, their art) inextricably bound up within them, but they also found that as their popularity increased, so did the frequency of censorship. None of them had a clear understanding of Instagram's censorship methods or saw a consistent pattern in their enforcement, and all of them were able to identify other kinds of content on Instagram that they find more offensive and destructive than nudity: violence, pro-anorexia accounts, hate speech, racism.

The argument for a more lenient attitude toward nudity on Instagram and Facebook is easy to counter: won't these platforms just become overrun with porn? If these artists must post content containing nudity, can't they just stick to Tumblr or, better yet, their personal sites? If Instagram and Facebook became a nudity-free-for-all, how would they shield underage teens from X-rated material? There have been precedents to substantiate these concerns: Vine's initial lack of censorship quickly ran the company into trouble, and an unregulated Android app called Pornstagram lived up to its namesake. At the same time, other mainstream platforms like Twitter and Tumblr have thrived despite dramatically looser content guidelines. Like many of the creatives we spoke to, blogger Karley Sciortino—who writes under the moniker Slutever—argues for a workable compromise between freedom and censorship: "There's no image filter on Twitter, and I'm sure there's so many porn Twitters, and so much porn on Tumblr—but I rarely see any." Sciortino adds, "I don't feel like it's one or the other. I don't think a nudity ban and a porn aggregate are the only two options. There's a middle ground."