For the past few days a teenager whose name is Taylor spent a lot of time uploading up to 900 photos on Instagram of an adorable little girl that watches TV and listens to music and uploads photos of pink grids, flowers, and cotton candy clouds. The same user has marked these photos, username is escty while her real name is Bianca Devins.
Last week, precisely on the 14th of July, Bianca Devins was murdered in the most brutal way and pictures of her body were posted on Discord, 4chan, and then Twitter. Her account was bombarded with people who wanted to express their sadness and support for her family and so a lot of accounts were sharing photos.
While Instagram began an action of having to remove the morbid photos of the young lady that kept appearing on its platform some users – including Taylor – also helped and this they did by setting up an account whose purpose is to cleaning the profile of Bianca Devins. By so doing, these people have indirectly volunteered themselves to be moderators who will be responsible for viewing and removing disturbing photos and content which might be dangerous to their mental health. While making a statement, Taylor said, “I wanted to do whatever I could to protect [Devins] and her family from having to go through any more pain and protect anyone from seeing the disgusting images”.
Tag cleaners as they prefer to be called, remove all violent content, harassment, and many more by uploading lots of pleasant images to tagged photos of any user, a sort of spam backed up by compassion.
According to one of these tag cleaners, tag cleaning offers protection which goes a long way than only reporting a malicious account. They say “It is harder to witch hunt the people who are posting graphic material because they can change their username. And if they eventually end up getting reported they can make a new account”. A tag cleaner who’s 15 years old by the name of Valerie said that tag cleaning the fastest way to push images to the very root of an account. In her words, “If you just report, it is likely that it won’t get taken down immediately and people will have enough time to save the picture and spread it, which is what we’re trying to avoid”.
As much as these tag cleaners are doing to better things online, they opened up to our sources about how tasking their job is and how much of a toll it takes on them but they can’t help the fact that certain things posted online hurt people. The tag cleaning community on Instagram is growing, however the existing tag cleaners do not advice that anyone should go into it without full detail of what it entails.
