The cover of Vanity Fair with Mahmood and Blanco and the absurd censorship of Instagram

Those who work with social media are well aware that Instagram has its own rules to enforce what our grandparents would have called “bad habit”: no nipples in plain sight as well as pudenda, but green light for the lower back and other strips of uncovered skin not better identified. What the Instagram algorithm ignores, however, is that the nude is not only a vulgar expression of the body, but also a means capable of conveying an important message such as, in the case of our cover with Mahmood and Blanco, winners of the Sanremo Festival, candidates for Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 and icons for millions of young people who look to their success with hope and a pinch of pride, the freedom to undress from labels and live free, refreshed, satisfied.

A concept that, however, the mechanical codes of a social network do not understand, since the Story shared by Mahmood on his Instagram profile with the Vanity Fair cover imprinted on it has been removed because, we quote literally, “violates our guidelines on sexual acts.” Leaving aside the fact that we don’t see what the obscenity is, as Mahmood and Blanco are immortalized by Luigi & Iangowho in their career have photographed iconic characters such as Madonna and Penélope Cruz, in a plastic pose that seems to follow the canons of Praxiteles, we would like to remember how much the artistic nude has been the spokesperson for battles and conquests, like Demi Moore’s baby bump who, in 1991, managed to make it clear that pregnant women want to continue to be desirable regardless of mother status. Or how, more recently, the graces of Vanessa Incontrada who, for the first time, chose to be immortalized without veils by Max Vadukul for our newspaper to demonstrate that she has made peace with the criticisms that have always made her suffer.

In this, fortunately, artistic expressions manage to be ahead of algorithms, showing us that there is still a long way to go before the guidelines of a social network reach the same degree of action of human sensitivity, the one that goes beyond the rigid barriers imposed by a code and that understands the right value to assign to a image or, as in this case, a cover.

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