Big & Tall Records incited a shadow ban from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google. Due to this heinously rad GIF we posted right after Queen Elizabeth's death. On Oct 7th 2022 during the queen's funeral procession we posted the Time magazine cover featuring the queen in a bright lime green suit and a hat to match. We thought it'd be great fun to turn her into a lizard using some custom AI tools that had just been open-sourced. We turned her into a lizard and tagged her the "Lizard Queen." We hoped it'd be a bit of satire that could generate some clicks and unfortunately it did.
In a matter of 3 minutes the video went viral stacking up 96k plays. As quickly as it went viral we got notification from Instagram that our post had violated their terms of service and we received a permanent strike against our account @Bigandtallrecords. We were banned from taking out ads. Not only did they abruptly cut off the views but suddenly our audience fell off.
Our little stunt had far reaching consequences. It not only affected our visibility on Instagram but also regionally restricted our account. We also noticed that somehow this had affected our YouTube streams, as well as our SEO. Our position on Google had also suddenly fallen off drastically. Our regular clicks of about 500 per month suddenly shifted to around 50 per month.
The numbers that were growing steadily every day suddenly vanished. The growth stopped on all channels and all organic play counts on all platforms began to lessen. In other words they turned us off. We appealed these decisions hundreds of times only to be blocked by Instagram's tech support.
Art should be protected under freedom of speech. These current platforms like Instagram, X, YouTube, Spotify and their algorithms vastly favor narrative over artwork. Their algorithms designed to suggest material that gets the most clicks (money), by driving the clicks towards current narratives — it has dulled the artist's voice to background noise.
At Big & Tall Records we hate this. We don't believe artists should be forced to create work for some narrative or some self-serving political agenda masquerading as artwork. Is this what artists have been reduced to? Either shout along with the mob or be silenced. Digital systems have made censorship as simple as turning a 1 to 0.
Even more concerning — congressional oversight hearings showing emails detailing the extent of tools Facebook, Instagram, Google created not just for the FBI and NSA but even the CCP. Meta and other tech companies are accused of working with federal agencies to:
- Suppress or remove content that went against government narratives.
- Silence certain political views under the label of misinformation or disinformation.
- Build internal tools and portals that allowed government officials to flag posts for removal.
This is often described as the "Censorship Industrial Complex" — where the government pressured private platforms to limit free speech. We believe we accidentally triggered their system with our Lizard Queen post, landing Big & Tall Records in the same category as domestic terrorists simply for posting satire.
Lest We Forget What Snowden Already Told Us About
PRISM
Direct access to data from major tech companies — emails, video chats, photos, documents. The technical foundation for identifying "targets" based on content; supporting the suppression of certain narratives flagged by authorities.
XKEYSCORE
A global digital dragnet — collects nearly everything a user does on the internet. Enables identification of dissenting voices or trending narratives in real time.
TEMPORA (GCHQ, shared with NSA)
Taps into fiber-optic cables to collect all internet traffic. Enables population-level analysis of opinion shifts, ideal for targeting "misinformation" campaigns preemptively.
Big & Tall Records will never censor or encourage censorship of any kind. Big & Tall Records and publishing are a safe haven for all protected speech. We want the artist to be successful, and free. Freedom for artistic minds instead of a cage and the death of their careers.