Vancouverscape, a Vancouver based blog covering travel, tech, and lifestyle

The AI culture has turned the world of social media into a dark and lonely place.

About seven weeks ago, my pristine Instagram business account (with close to 15K followers), one that I had built up over the course of eight years, was compromised. I was the unfortunate receiving end of a Bitcoin scam that has made life miserable for many fellow bloggers and content creators. Just a week after mine was hacked, another Toronto-based Instagrammer friend of mine suffered the same fate.

While I have been unsuccessful in getting Instagram’s security team to return my emails, even having gone as far as to blog the experience to show that I am the owner and founder of this blog, my Toronto friend received notification within a day. He was asked to submit a selfie video, showing various facial positions, comparable to setting up Face ID on a smart phone.

Instagram then looked through his account to find selfies to match the submitted video. Although he had selfies in his feed, Instagram emailed him to report that a match couldn’t be made, so his account was lost forever.

The entire process is automated; Instagram is an enormous company and as such doesn’t hire people to look after issues of this nature.

After all this time, my account is still in limbo.

There are neither phone contacts nor emails that lead to a personal interaction, which to me, completely zaps the “social” out of social media.

On another note, I have been live-streaming music to Twitch for over a year now. One of the perks of being an affiliate is the ability to earn money via subscribers and monetary contributions aka “bits”. With that comes the chance to add individuality to your brand via emotes, both static (nine) and animated (five).

The process is pretty straightforward: You upload the emote(s) via the platform’s Creator Dashboard and Twitch approves them for use in your channel.

As a designer, this has been a fun and creative way of expressing my channel’s focus, whether that’s a band logo or a spinning Ska record.

Back in January however, I uploaded two emotes that to my surprise, were rejected by Twitch.

A static emote of a Duran Duran album was rejected, because of the two DD letters in their logo. I can only surmise that these appeared to those in charge of approval as a single-letter emote, which goes against Twitch guidelines.

I was puzzled. This is a known Duran Duran album. There’s nothing on that album other than the two letters and a series of black lines.

Even more ridiculous was the most recent submission of an animated dancing Lisa Simpson (of The Simpsons) emote. The reason for that one being rejected? Sexual content! What???

Please explain to me how a dancing Lisa Simpson cartoon character in a dress is considered sexually-explicit content?

I contacted their team on both rejection notices and neither emote has been approved to this day. What sort of person views these emotes as ‘harmful’ to the public?

Based on how these companies work with content creators, it’s no surprise that social media has taken a severe nosedive in the past few years.

Being rejected for emotes isn’t that much of a fiasco, unless you’d like to gain access to five additional “follower” emotes available to your followers during your stream.

Numerous Twitch affiliates are denied these emotes due to nonsensical guidelines. I’d have sworn that Twitch uses bots to connect with their creators, but they actually DO have humans that return emails.

The problem is that they are useless when it comes to explaining WHY an emote like a Duran Duran album cover or a popular dancing cartoon character isn’t considered suitable for their audience.

I currently have a smaller, engaged music-related Instagram account and continue to stream to Twitch for the enjoyment as well as for the community I have built over the past 14 months. I’m just keeping my expectations very low for these mega social media sites going forward.