Picture this: it is 2017, in the Toronto Reference Library. Two younger and eager Juliette & Fanny are nervously giggling at the "PUBLISH” button on their website. Finally, Scandaleuse was about to be shared with the world after so many hours being built in their heads. One click later, the business was officially born, and the word needed to be spread out.
What do you do then? Well, you start building an online presence. That's what business people say to do. We had a beautiful portfolio, tons of ideas and were ready to rock the social media madness.
Until, not even a week in, our posts got deleted and our accounts got threatened to be removed from Instagram and Facebook. Try to spread the word about your small business when you can't even post what you do.
You may wonder: "wow, what did the share for this to happen? Porn? Someone eating a kitten?" AHA. Just barely revealing boudoir photos than the platforms decided were for "adult sexual solicitation” (!!!). And it has been like that ever since.
Example of said “adult sexual solicitation”….
Why do we care to begin with?
We are going to be very honest: our clients don't come from social media, or very rarely. We could probably get away with not having a social media presence at all. The reasons why we are working so hard on our Instagram is for 4 main goals:
Build a kind and respectful community;
Educate around sensuality, body love and removing its negative stigma and pressure;
Inspire and empower people (especially women) to be who they want to be;
Show real bodies in an ocean of heavily edited, unachievable BS.
When our posts aren't taken down, we do succeed. We have met wonderful people and created beautiful projects thanks to social media, the most recent being our Unstoppable Exhibit, which also became the last straw in our thought process of getting the hell out of social media, once and for all.
As you can imagine, we have gone through multiple phases with our online presence, some comical, some a lot less.
The social media phases yours truly went through:
1) The "F*** you, we will do what we want" phase
That's when the little rebels that we are decided to try to stick it to the Man! You don't want us to post nipples? We will talk about it even more. We became officially black listed and to this day, we can't even do paid ads anywhere even if we posted the photo of a baby alpaca. That lasted a couple of years, until we realized we were pretty powerless and the removal of our accounts was imminent.
2) The "Fine, we will play by the rules" phase.
We became good girls and adjusted our entire vision to make sure the censorship monster wasn't gonna smack us. Nipples were blurred out and all. But then, IG changed once again their policy and it wasn't just the photos themselves that needed to be super PG, but also the wording.
Writing things like “nudity” “boudoir” “sexy” and so on became automatically flagged. The posts weren't deleted, but they weren't shown to anybody. 👌 That's shadow banning, and as you can imagine, completely useless for anybody trying to build a social media presence.
3) The "pack your bags and go" phase.
We were dealing with our shadowban frustration, battling with the "what is even the point of busting our butts with well thought and genuine content if nobody can see it?!", but we were still kicking.
Until we started talking about our Unstoppable Exhibit.
See, this project was solely created to spread awareness about domestic violence and collect donations for 2 charities offering help and shelters to the victims. But guess what. The words "domestic violence" or "abuse" are flagged. The series of photos contains partial nudity. So the posts were barely shown and it 👏 pissed 👏 us 👏 off.
Having to censor ourselves about our artistic work is already annoying enough, but seeing it happen when we are sharing content that could literally save lives was the last straw.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there
It has been 6 years now that we launched our social media platforms and this censorship is still happening and unfortunately getting worse. Recently we noticed that now even Google is removing some of our business posts (once again for inappropriate content 😡) and there is nothing we can do beside changing the main picture over and over again until we find the “proper” one.
It might not seems like it but this BS is time consuming and a big factor of stress. 90% of our clients find us through Google so the idea of being censored there is very scary as it could impact our business negatively.
We constantly feel this Damocles sword above our heads.
So… what now?
We love what we do and work really hard to build our business and educate people on the over-sexualization of the female body. So we had to find an alternative:
We are spending less and less time and energy on those stupid social media platforms, and devoting much more to our newsletter. This is our own land, we can share whatever we want to without fearing to be removed. Not having to worry about this is giving us a new love for writing and sharing.
Every Saturday, we combine a mixture of the following in our "Scandaleuse Letter":
- educational resources;
- empowering tips & tricks;
- gorgeous photography;
- new projects; and,
- behind the scenes.
Our only hope? That you will join the 500 people that are already there.
All you have to do is fill out the form below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
We can't wait to see you on the other side,
With love 💖,
- The slightly older but still eager Juliette & Fanny