Instagram will unblock the #curvy hashtag

After a week of controversy, Instagram is unblocking the #curvy hashtag, effective the afternoon of July 23. Instagram first prevented users from searching for photos with the term the week of July 13, prompting a huge backlash from users and women's advocacy groups who were outraged to see a term normally associated with body-positive messages removed from the site. A spate of replacement hashtags, including "curvee," "bringcurvyback" sprang up to fill in the gap. The problem was that the #curvy hashtag was being used for other reasons, said Nicky Jackson Colaco, Instagram's director of public policy. Namely, pornography. And the tag was overrun, she said.

Instagram has protocols in place to flag when any term is being consistently associated with content that breaks the company's terms of service. Jackson Colaco said that Instagram removes several tags every day when analysis from the company's automated and human content filtering systems get reports from users that they've become a problem. And at some point last week, #curvy hit the tipping point. The decision to block #curvy, therefore, really had nothing to do with its meaning at all. "This wasn't curvy pornography, this was just irrelevant pornography" that used the hashtag, Jackson Colaco said.