Call Aarti Olivia Dubey a bus driver, people.
Because she just took Instagram to school!
A Singaporean-Indian plus-size fashion blogger, Dubey uses her social media account to share pictures of outfits, makeup, quotes and over 16,000 Instagram followers.
Fair enough, right? That’s what many people do on Instagram these days.
But Dubey was forced to call out the service after seeing that a photo of her and her friends in two-piece bathing suits had been aken down.
How come? Because Instagram said it “violated community guidelines.”
Interesting. Instagram did not delete that recent photo of Kim Kardashian’s naked butt.
It’s hard not to see this as an issue centered around how much Dubey and her friends weigh.
“Take a good look at us three. Do you know what we have in common? The belief that Any Body deserves to look good in what they wear,” Dubey write as a caption to the supposedly scandalous image.
“Be it a swimsuit, a pair of jeans, a dress, lingerie, a crop top. We have seen and heard the shaming directed towards us.”
After nearly two weeks of contacting Instagram about the photo removal, sending out a series of photos and calling on her followers to re-post the above photo in question, Dubey said Instagram did restore the image.
As you can see below, a Community Operations employee e-mailed her an apology, citing the photo’s removal as “a mistake” that happened “accidentally.”
Hmmm… sorry if we’re suspicious over that claim.
And we’re not the only ones.
For Dubey, the mea culpa came “a little too late after I had to deal with all the bloody trolls and haters last week.”
She added, via her account:
I accept your apology Instagram but it does not change a thing. You have placed the image back but at what cost? …
You are answerable to ALL of my plus size friends for removing their images or accounts on Instagram or Facebook.
Check your latent fatphobia. Check your guidelines and policies. Take better care of the people who use your services as a means of staying connected to oceans of people who just want to exist as people.
Fatphobia? We love it!
We wish it didn’t exist and a term didn’t need to be invented for it.
But we hope this at least catches up and prevents future similar incidents from occurring.