On December 8, 2025, Instagram permanently terminated the account @nipeople, a project by artist, journalist, and activist Emma Shapiro, instantly erasing years of work and sparking a legal debate over digital freedom.
The Instagram account was part of Exposure Therapy, a project begun in 2017 that aims to challenge gender-based discrimination by highlighting the ways society’s sexualization of female-presenting bodies is reflected in various laws. Image after image of female nipples filled the feed, each posing the same question: Is any body inherently pornographic?
The conversation was cut short in 2025, when Meta, the parent company of Instagram, suspended the account after Shapiro posted a short video depicting a utility pole plastered in Exposure Therapy’s nipple stickers, citing alleged violations of its Community Standards on “account integrity.”
@nipeople was deleted one day later, after Shapiro submitted an appeal through Instagram’s in-app review process. Shapiro, who was born in the US but lives in Spain, has since taken legal action with the aid of Avant-Garde Lawyers (AGL), a group specializing in cases involving creative censorship. In June, AGL filed a complaint with the Spanish Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC) on behalf of the artist, arguing that Meta failed to comply with several obligations under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
“Meta failed to provide a sufficiently clear statement of reasons for its decision, denied Shapiro access to an effective internal complaint-handling process, and failed to act in a diligent, objective and proportionate manner when imposing the severe sanction of permanent account termination,” AGL said in a statement.
A screenshot of Meta notifying Emma Shapiro that the appeal to restore the @nipeople account was denied.
Courtesy the artist
There are two separate procedures for the complaint: one is an out-of-court dispute resolution procedure through User Rights, a European settlement body serving content moderation issues, which, as confirmed by the Art Newspaper, has contacted Meta for details of the case. The second is a complaint to the CNMC, Spain’s Digital Services Coordinator, which has yet to begin its formal assessment
“This case is personal, but the issue is systemic,” Shapiro told ARTnews via email. “Artists and other users are increasingly subject to opaque decisions by digital platforms that can erase years of work without adequate explanation or an effective avenue for appeal.”
Shapiro added that she has seen these challenges firsthand through her work as editor-at-large of Don’t Delete Art, a collaborative project of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Arts and Culture Advocacy program, which advocates for artistic freedom online. The site tracks incidents of alleged artistic censorship, joining a growing number of digital archives and reporting tools that have emerged in recent years to document threats to creative expression and First Amendment rights.
In her email, Shapiro continued, “For artists, the greatest danger isn’t just that a work is removed. It’s that the fear of arbitrary removal changes what gets created in the first place. When people cannot trust that their work will be treated fairly, many stop experimenting, avoid controversial subjects, or censor themselves before anyone else does. That chilling effect is one of the most serious consequences of unaccountable platform power.”
Andra Matei, AGL’s Executive Director and legal lead on the case, said in a statement that, “For an artist, losing an account can mean losing years of work, audience, income and visibility overnight,” adding that “The DSA is meant to ensure that platforms are not beyond legal scrutiny. Meta is powerful, but it is not outside the law”.
