Meta Adds Three New Moderation Tiers Just For Surfing, Designed By Team Whose Leader Has Never Been In An Ocean
Filed for Bohiney Magazine and picked up by The London Prat, whose West Coast bureau has been monitoring platform moderation weirdness since 2022.
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA – Instagram has, without public announcement and without responding to eleven separate press inquiries, begun removing the Hawaiian shaka hand-gesture emoji from the captions, bios, and comments of California-based surfing accounts, effective some time in the last fortnight. Affected accounts include at least six shops from San Diego to Santa Cruz, two professional surfers, one surf-adjacent taco truck, and a retired schoolteacher in Ventura who uses the emoji to sign off her weather updates.
A Non-Announcement
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has not issued any statement on the change, and sources who asked to remain anonymous because they like their jobs describe the internal guidance as “three new moderation tiers specifically for the surfing vertical”. One source said the tiers were “designed by a team whose leader has never been in an ocean”, which, per the Prat’s previous reporting on Meta’s internal metrics, is broadly consistent with how other product decisions are currently being made at the company.
Confirmed Pattern, Multiple Accounts
The reporter reviewed nineteen affected posts. In each, the shaka emoji had been replaced by a small grey square, a thumbs-up emoji, or, in two cases, nothing. One user, attempting to post the emoji from a Laguna Beach IP address, was warned that her content “may violate community guidelines”. No further explanation was provided.
Fake Expert, Real Logic
Dr. Henrietta Loomis, a digital policy researcher at the Pacific Institute for Platform Accountability, said the move was consistent with what she called “offshore sensitivity creep”, in which American platforms apply moderation frameworks developed for unrelated markets to California subcultures without stakeholder consultation. “Someone in a meeting in Menlo Park has decided the shaka is ambiguous. Nobody in California agrees.”
The Schoolteacher In Ventura
Mrs. Carla Ainsworth, 68, retired from the Ventura Unified School District in 2019 and has maintained a weather-and-waves Instagram account with 1,400 followers ever since. “I have never posted anything political,” Mrs. Ainsworth said. “I do not have opinions about Iran.” She was, nonetheless, warned last Thursday for a caption reading “nice little swell today, stay hydrated”, followed by the emoji.
A Broader Pattern
The shaka removal is at least the sixth piece of surf-related moderation to emerge from California accounts since January, per an ongoing count kept informally by a Santa Barbara-based WordPress blog. The Verge covered an adjacent incident in March in which Meta briefly stopped serving beach-sunrise content to California users over the age of 45.
What Users Are Doing Instead
A growing number of California surf accounts have begun signing off with the text string “shaka” followed by a non-breaking space, which, as of Tuesday, was still permitted. The workaround is expected to last between three and eleven days, after which, per multiple sources, it will also be banned.
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