The California portion of the protest will take place at Instagram headquarters, 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park at 10 a.m. Pacific time; the New York City portion will take place at the internet giant's New York headquarters at 770 Broadway, beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
On June 19, the Erotic Service Providers Union (ESPU) will welcome the members of the Adult Performers Actors Guild who are organizing a strike known as #instastrike to the San Francisco Bay Area. Video performers, dancers, cam performers and all other types of sex workers will come together to demand a meeting with Instagram to discuss the unfair and discriminatory treatment of having over 800 accounts deleted for "violating the Terms of Service agreement." We will be demanding Instagram reinstate the accounts.
“Adult performers, exotic dancers, web cam performers, and sex workers are being wrongfully deleted from the social media platform Instagram. For two months, we have been organizing those wrongfully deleted to stand up and fight the social media giant owned by Facebook,” said Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performers Actors Guild. “At this time we have nearly 1,000 people signed on to our legal fight. We have a team of lawyers looking into a class action lawsuit against Instagram because of their blatant discrimination against sex workers across the world.”
“Many folks in the sex trades have been arbitrarily targeted by these social media companies under the guise of complying with the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)," said ESPU organizer Maxine Doogan. “It's just too convenient that the whole Internet was monetized on the backs of the adult film performers and now these Silicon Valley giants just decide anyone they don’t want is in violation of their overboard terms of agreement, which really positions them as third party bosses deciding who gets to work today and who doesn’t.”
Of particular concern are recent reports that Instagram has reinstated some deleted accounts when the performers who owned them have paid money to yet another third party.
