Instagram’s Silent War on African Creatives

When you scroll through an Instagram feed and see vibrant artwork, up-and-coming fashion designers, bold photographers across the globe, what you don’t often see is how fragile that “platform” actually is. For many African creatives, Instagram has not just been a social space, it has been a storefront, a studio, a launch pad. Yet now what looked like freedom is increasingly proving to be a precarious contract.

Morning of the Vanishing

Meet Tolani (name changed for privacy), an illustrator in Jos whose breakthrough was months in the making. His work re-imagined Ijebu folklore with futuristic aesthetics: digital paintings of Ijebu in neon, comics about everyday Nigerian life rendered with sharp wit, murals that caught the eye of global fashion houses. He built his community organically over five years 65,000 followers, DMs full of commission requests, collaborations in the making. Then one morning, he woke up and his feed was gone. His account disabled. The message: “Your account has been disabled for violating community guidelines.”

No warning. No explanation. Three years of work gone. Pages of DM inquiries evaporated. The global brand outreach he’d been courting? Also gone. In that moment the promise cracked. The storytelling platform became a trap door.

Why the System Fails Us

Tolani’s story isn’t an outlier. It reflects structural flaws in how Instagram moderates content globally.

Lack of Cultural and Linguistic Context

Most moderation is automated, built on machine-learning models that draw heavily from Western languages and cultural norms. African creatives work in dozens of languages, dialects, cultural idioms. A Yoruba costume exploration might be flagged as “nudity”. A protest cartoon in Swahili may be labelled “hate speech”. These systems don’t understand the difference between ritual body art and pornography, political satire and harassment.

Invisible Gatekeeping through Opaque Algorithms

These moderation models act like gatekeepers: they determine which creatives stay visible and which vanish, with hardly any transparency. Creatives aren’t simply ignored, they are actively removed or hidden. Meanwhile, abuses of local languages and local communities occur with little moderation because those languages aren’t supported robustly. That imbalance creates a terrain where the creative loses, while harmful content in under-monitored areas persists unchecked.

Intellectual Property Chaos

African artists already face rampant art theft and plagiarism. When they try to reclaim stolen work via Instagram/Meta’s systems, they enter bureaucratic limbo. Appeals drag on, responses are automated, the time lost means lost clients, lost momentum, lost income. For many creatives, time isn’t luxury, it’s livelihood.

More Than Just “Account Disabled”

Losing an Instagram profile isn’t like losing a personal blog. It’s losing your business, your brand, your public voice.

Financial Crash

Tolani’s account was his source of income: freelance projects, brand collaborations, direct commissions. The moment his page disappeared, revenue stopped. Clients went silent. His digital portfolio, central to upward mobility, was erased. For many creatives in Africa, where banking, financial systems and traditional opportunities may already be constrained, the online presence is the difference between survival and precarity.

A Vanished Community

All those followers, comments, tags, shared posts, collaborations, they form a network, a trust-cache. Getting to 65K followers in five years is hard work. After the takedown, rebuilding that trust and network is much harder, far costlier, and often impossible for many creators with limited time and resources.

Creative and Mental Burnout

In response to frequent fear of being de-platformed, creatives begin to self-censor. They post what they think the algorithm “allows” instead of what they want to express. Art becomes “content” optimized for visibility rather than authenticity. The endless chase for safe posts, predictable engagement, algorithmic favour becomes its own form of creative death. Many report anxiety, existential doubts, exhaustion.

Back to the Old Gatekeepers

When Instagram becomes unreliable, once again creatives are pushed toward offline intermediaries: galleries, agencies, promoters, often with less favourable terms, limited reach, and inferior autonomy. The digital breakthrough that promised decentralised access is undermined if the platform itself is unstable.

What Must Change, and What We Should Demand

This isn’t just about individuals, it’s about the future of Africa’s creative economy and digital sovereignty.

Build Moderation Systems with Context

Meta (Instagram’s parent company) must invest in moderation teams across Africa: humans who understand local culture, languages, art forms. Systems shouldn’t rely exclusively on global models built outside the continent. Creatives deserve moderators who know the difference between a Highlife lyric video and hate speech.

Transparent, Fast Appeals

When accounts are disabled, the method must be transparent, accessible, and human-driven. Creatives cannot languish weeks or months wondering why their work vanished. A visible, responsive appeals process is a basic fairness requirement in a system where their livelihood is at stake.

Empower African-Owned Platforms

We need homegrown platforms built from the ground up for Africa, not just as “local versions” of Western apps, but with structures that reflect African linguistic diversity, IP realities, monetisation models, and moderation norms. Digital sovereignty isn’t a buzzword, it’s a survival strategy for creatives whose entire business depends on being seen.

Visibility Is Power, Erasure Is Loss

The algorithm is no longer just automated code, it is a gatekeeper, arbiter, and sometimes executioner of creatives’ visibility. For African artists, losing a platform isn’t just a technical glitch, it’s losing identity, work, community, potential.

Kwame’s story is echoing across the continent. The next time you scroll past a colourful illustration, bold design or sharp photo from Africa, remember that the artist behind it may be fighting more than creative exhaustion. They may be battling erasure.

Instagram may have promised a global stage. But without accountability, cultural context and creator-centered systems, it can just as quickly become a staging ground for invisibility. For Africa’s creative economy to thrive, talent alone isn’t enough. We must fight for a digital ecosystem where visibility isn’t conditional, and where erasure isn’t the price of participation.