Instagram is mentioned in The Bob Zadek Show only as one item in enumerations of large social media platforms. No episode in the excerpts takes Instagram as its subject, and no guest or host describes the company’s ownership, founding, policies or history. The references are incidental: Instagram appears as an example of a platform on which users post content, as a platform whose distribution is said to be limited, and as a place where a guest may be found.
As an example of a user-generated platform
In the 2019-03-05 episode on the war on sex workers, Elizabeth Nolan Brown placed Instagram within a general account of how open internet platforms work. She described a model in which “any user can sign up,” naming Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and said that such platforms employ filters and moderators that tell users what content they may not post. In her account, if users nonetheless post prohibited content, the website generally cannot be held responsible — the person who posts a credible threat can be in trouble, but the platform cannot. She offered this as background to the litigation against Backpage, where courts repeatedly held that federal law barred holding the website liable and told plaintiffs that changing the law was the remedy. Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019)
Bob Zadek’s framing in the same segment treated Backpage as a for-profit alternative media outlet carrying personal and adult advertising, and asked what federal law had to do with a publication connecting adults. He noted that the Backpage founders and former leaders had been arrested and faced trial, and that they were charged with money laundering rather than with sex-trafficking offenses. He argued that prostitution is a misdemeanor where criminal at all, that Nevada regulates it legally, and that the federal government has no business regulating promotion of the activity. Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019)
Reach and the social contract
In the 2019-04-24 episode on social media censorship, Bill Ottman said that on Facebook and Instagram and others — including Google and YouTube — a user reaches only 5% of the people who subscribe to them. He called this a degradation of what he described as the original concept of social media: that a subscriber sees the posts of the person they subscribe to. Bob Zadek characterized that original concept as a social contract, and Ottman agreed, saying the contract had been degraded by 95% and that lawsuits were in the works over whether it was valid or amounted to false advertising. Ottman also said brands had paid for followers under the premise of reaching them, only to lose the ability to reach the followers they bought. Social Media Censorship (2019)
Bob Zadek, in the same episode, drew a parallel between commercial television and cable and said Facebook was magnificent as targeted marketing but an abject failure as a marketplace of ideas. He described Facebook as choosing which friends speak and which words are heard, and asked Ottman how Minds.com served as an antidote to the censorship of Facebook and Twitter. Social Media Censorship (2019)
Censorship and Section 230
In the 2019-06-20 episode, Bob Zadek listed Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and similar platforms as businesses operating with maximum editorial freedom, able to set their own publishing standards and to delete or de-platform users as a matter of contract or right. He asked Frank Buckley whether that was a fair starting point. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Buckley agreed and distinguished private censorship, which he said he did not oppose — if Facebook wants to delete a neo-Nazi’s account, he has no problem with it — from the case that prompted his concern, which he described as the deletion of an account belonging to a conservative comedian who told jokes. Bob Zadek compared that episode to Lenny Bruce and Shelley Berman being arrested for telling jokes, and said the comedian lost his rights to publish on YouTube. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Buckley described Section 230 of what he called the Decency in Communications Act, passed 20-odd years earlier, as exempting social media from having to worry about content. He used the analogy of a fence and a billboard: the owner is not responsible for what someone posts, and is not responsible if he takes it down either. He said the prior should be that Facebook is a private company and can post or not post what it wants, while acknowledging that social media is important to how people trade messages and that conservatives say they are being discriminated against by ultra-liberals in Silicon Valley. He rejected breaking up the platforms as a remedy, calling it beyond stupid. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Across episodes
Instagram is touched on in three episodes — the 2019-03-05 interview with Elizabeth Nolan Brown, the 2019-04-24 interview with Bill Ottman, and the 2019-06-20 interview with Frank Buckley — and in each it appears only as one name in a list of platforms. The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Instagram itself: the earlier episodes use it as an example of a user-generated platform subject to moderation and reduced reach, and the later episode uses it the same way in a discussion of editorial freedom and Section 230. No speaker advances a position about Instagram that a later speaker revises.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state who owns Instagram, when it was founded, or what its content policies are. They do not describe any Instagram-specific controversy, enforcement action, or legal proceeding. The only direct reference to Instagram as a destination rather than an example is Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s mention, in the 2022-09-12 episode, that she can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @ENBrown, alongside her Reason newsletter and the Feminists for Liberty group. Student Loan Debt Forgiveness (2022)