We Will Not Be Quiet. We Will Be Inclusive
Since the inception of StoryForge, one of the key tenants has always been that everyone is welcome on StoryForge. It doesn’t matter your race, gender, sexuality, or background: you have a place at StoryForge. With everything going on in the world, we felt it was worth reminding everyone of that. So we posted a carousel of images on Instagram on January 21st, 2025 which included this image:
Quite frankly, we didn’t think anything of it until a marketing meeting on February 3.
The team was discussing how our metrics on Instagram seemed to be dropping for no reason we could pinpoint. We know traffic fluctuates but we’d never seen a drop quite like this. Here’s our Views and Reach for January.
Since we had recently been offered the option of monetization for our carousels, we decided to see how much we’d earned and how this drop in traffic was impacting our earnings. That is only available through mobile so after logging in and going about three or four levels down, we found this:
Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Our post, specifically the slide about all genders, sexualities, races, and backgrounds, has been flagged for “Objectionable Activity”.
It wasn’t the first slide in the carousel so the violation was clearly for this particular slide. We certainly don’t think anything we said is objectionable. There isn’t anything objectionable about being welcoming to all people.
So we decided to look at what Meta describes as “Objectionable Activity”.
Are you as confused as we were? What item on this list does what we said fall under?
So to recap:
We posted that StoryForge is welcoming to people of all races, sexualities, genders, and backgrounds on 1/21/2025.
On 1/21/2025, we received a buried notification that we had violated Meta’s policies.
First off, we stand by what we said. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. We’ll say it again right now: StoryForge is open to readers and writers of all races, sexualities, genders, and backgrounds.
Secondly, we find it offensive and horrific that Meta has flagged this content as objectionable. Whether it be by actual person or by algorithm, what we said was flagged by Meta. There’s no way to deny that. Speaking up for diversity got us a flag. We’d like to point out that our account never received any kind of penalty or ban notice or anything of the like. Clean bill of health as far as the main account showed.
Now we decided to take a second look at our metrics and wouldn’t you know it?
The absolute plummeting of our metrics happened that same day. From January 21-31, our Views, Reach, Content Interactions, and Profile Visits were all down around 50% compared to the previous ten days. For anyone wondering, we had 7 posts from January 10-20 and 5 posts from the 21st-31st so it wasn’t a lack of content. Both sets were a mix of Reels and Carousels so not a difference in media type either.
We’re not saying something happened to our account but it does seem both suspicious and extremely convenient timing.
From there, we started to look at some of the individual posts. This is from our very next Instagram post on January 24, 2025:
Our Instagram account has been active for years now and we’ve never seen a breakdown like that. This is Meta’s own dashboard too, not a 3rd party, directly from the source. We’re not social media savants but something here sure looks fishy. Three of our posts had interesting data skews as well until evening back out at the start of February.
So again, all this seems suspicious to us. It seems suspicious and it feels like our message was buried.
We posted about being accepting of diversity, got hit with a policy violation that was buried somewhere only visible in the Instagram mobile app, and then our traffic tanks and our own followers weren’t shown our posts. It all seems… strange, to put it mildly. We’re not accusing anyone of anything but we felt the need to point out the discrepancies that we’ve found because we will not let our message be suppressed.
No matter what we’ve found happens to us or what might befall our Meta social media accounts, StoryForge will not stand down. It’s our duty as people who want to be good human beings to offer a safe space for those who might not have one. We extend this offer to any reader or writer out there who is in need of such a platform.
We will not be quiet, we will not back down, and we hope you won’t either.
And if you suddenly can’t find us on Instagram, you can find us on TikTok, Threads, YouTube, and BlueSky.
We’ll see you at the Forge,
The StoryForge Team
