Instagram suspends anti-pedophile group

Meta-owned Instagram Wednesday abruptly suspended the anti-pedophile group Gays Against Groomers before suddenly reinstating the account.

Gays Against Groomers (GAG) describes itself as “A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of ‘LGBTQIA+’.” 

The group’s crusade against the sexualization of children has drawn fire from gender totalitarians like the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Southern Poverty Law Center, who have declared GAG an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” 

"Instagram has just SUSPENDED our account with 360,000 followers,” GAG told its nearly 400,000 followers on X Wednesday. “This comes just weeks after GLAAD and Media Matters’ pressure campaign calling on them to do so. Instagram gave us no reason and we had no content violations. This was a direct attack because of their malicious lies about us. 

“It’s unbelievable that a group like ours who only seeks to protect children and their innocence can be banned for ‘hate speech,’ but here we are. 

“We have appealed but it is highly unlikely we will get it back.”

But Instagram suddenly reinstated the account hours later, which media operatives at the Advocate suggest was out of fear of Republicans in Congress:

A person close to ongoing discussions between advocacy groups and Meta who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Advocate that the reinstatement stemmed from political pressures within Meta. They speculated that while Meta’s trust and safety team likely found the group to violate the platform’s guidelines, an intervention might have come from the company’s political team to avert the scrutiny of Republicans in Congress, who have been critical of social media companies for purportedly suppressing conservative voices.

Facebook, also owned by Meta, abruptly suspended GAG for three days last month. 

Meta is only one of several large corporations who have targeted the group since it began in June last year. 

In September 2022 GAG was suddenly deplatformed by PayPal and Venmo without explanation.

"We’ve never gotten a violation before,” GAG Founder Jaimee Mitchell told Tucker Carlson at the time. “They said that we violated, though, their user agreements, which, we’re not sure what in the agreement we violated. There was no really detailed message to that. Just the notification that we have been banned."

Mitchell added that the organization is "comprised completely of gay people. We even have a few trans people in our organization. Just trying to fight this evil that is happening in the name of LGBTQIA, you know, the whole alphabet mafia now."

A PayPal spokesperson later told the Advocate, however, that “PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence, or discriminatory intolerance.”