WHAT HAPPENED TO @BLOODOFAURORA?
What happened
On May 18th, 2026, Instagram permanently removed the BLOOD OF AURORA account.
This came two months after a federal court ordered Meta to pay $375M in a child safety lawsuit. In the wake of that ruling, Meta significantly escalated enforcement against accounts dealing with sexuality, the body and women’s health — regardless of artistic or educational context. BLOOD OF AURORA was one of many such accounts removed in this period.
With its removal disappeared more than a decade of work: an archive of artwork, interviews and conversations built with thousands of women, mothers and artists around the world. Not a profile — a living, ongoing record of how women have been exploring creativity, motherhood, sexuality, grief and transformation through art.
Overnight, it became inaccessible.
What was lost
•12+ years of content and community contributions
• A curated archive of artwork, interviews and creative projects
• Connections to nearly 220,000 followers and the daily discourse between them
• Countless stories and submissions entrusted to us by our community
• An independent platform dedicated to women’s voices and embodied creative expression
Much of this existed only within the platform itself and cannot be fully recovered
Why this matters
Since 2014, BLOOD OF AURORA has amplified voices often pushed to the margins — women, mothers, artists — and created space for embodied creative expression in a culture built for speed and consumption.
Words like erotic, pleasure and vagina are flagged or shadowbanned on Instagram, even when used in artistic, educational, or simply human contexts. These are not explicit terms. They describe ordinary bodily and emotional experiences.
Language is how we come to understand our own experiences and how we recognize them in each other. Without words for what we feel, we cannot fully know it ourselves, let alone share it. A community built on writing and embodied expression depends on the freedom to use this language — without it, both self-awareness and connection are at risk.
When a platform removes an account like this, or restricts the words it can use, it removes culture, memory and the vocabulary through which people understand themselves and each other. It raises real questions:
Who gets to be visible online?
Platforms such as Instagram, aren't neutral. They make decisions, often through automated systems, about whose content gets shown and whose is suppressed or removed entirely. When an account dedicated to women’s art and stories gets removed while other content stays up, its worth asking: what determines that? Is it actually about safety or guidelines or is it about what kind of content and which voices the platform considers acceptable or valuable?
Who gets to decide what language is permitted?
Words like vagina or pleasure get flagged by the algorithm as if they're inherently problematic, regardless of context. Someone, or some system, decided these words are risky. That decision shapes what an entire community can say about their own bodies and experiences.
These aren't neutral technical glitches. These are decisions made by a company that have enormous influence on our culture, on whose stories get to be told and what language we, the people, are allowed to use to tell them. And hese decisions are largely invisible and unaccountable.
Note from BLOOD OF AURORA
For over a decade, this has been a home — a place where women gathered to speak their truth, share their work, and feel less alone in it. What was lost can’t be measured in follower counts. It was an archive of collective expression, built one story, one word, at a time. We believe creative work matters. We believe women’s voices matter. We believe independent spaces for art, storytelling, and community — and the language to make them possible — deserve to exist and to be protected.
BLOOD OF AURORA will continue — wherever it must live.
How You Can Help
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Contact us in DM or email if you can help us reinstate the account