Don’t Be a Shitty Instagram Brand: An Interview with Activist Natasha Vianna
Name: Natasha Vianna
Pronouns: she/her
One of your favorite nonprofits that everyone should give to: We Testify
Over the past year, we’ve seen a rise in nonprofit organizations and brands posting viral Twitter screenshots on their Instagram feeds. They’re those feel good, mic drop, and quirky tweets that get shared—usually written by folks of color. It’s an easy tactic, now known as “content curation,” but the curators are often vague about their desired outcome. Content like this is being elevated by organizations on Instagram, and may seem like an inclusive strategy, but that isn’t the case if they’re not centering and giving the creators credit. And what happens when those organizations build massive followings based on someone else’s brilliance and creativity to monetize their accounts? Here’s who doesn’t benefit: the creators.
As we’re seeing more of this, we reached out to Natasha Vianna (@natashavianna on Twitter, whose tweets are often making the rounds on Instagram!) about how organizations that have “empowerment” in their mission statements can re-analyze their social media strategies and how we, as individuals, engage with those organizations and brands.
ReproJobs: There are so many accounts posting tweet screenshots on their Instagram feeds under the guise of elevating and empowering women’s voices. Where did this Instagram strategy start?
Natasha Vianna: It’s not a new strategy and it definitely wasn’t started by some of these newer organizations and brands. The strategy has become so common in the last year that many of us don’t know or remember how the trend started. Remember the guys who marketed the fraudulent Fyre Festival? They were one of the first Instagram accounts to steal and use screenshots of other peoples’ content, build a massive following, and monetize it. It was called audience growth hacking and they built a large business with that uncredited and stolen content.
This plan was intentionally designed to capitalize from free, unrestricted content without sharing any of the benefits with their creators. No engagement, no audience, and no monetization for you. Most importantly, this all happened without your consent. It’s not surprising that this part of our recent history has been forgotten or rebranded.
But let’s be clear about this: posting someone else’s tweets on Instagram can be good if you have consent and if you’re sharing your power, influence, and engagement with the creators.
ReproJobs: Over the last year or so, the strategy seems so much more common but seems to be erasing a lot of people from their ideas and words or even taking them out of the original intent or context. Why are organizations and brands still using this strategy?
Natasha Vianna: As someone who has been responsible for building communities and managing social media accounts, it’s a lot of work to create compelling and engaging content every single day. The screenshot approach might seem like a fast and easy way to publish content that will help you reach your growth metrics - and it is! But innovation tends to move faster than ethics and morals, so we’re often left with people who believe in “moving fast and asking for forgiveness later” taking content without consent. But is this really the belief that we want to embrace in our work and replicate in our empowering spaces? Simply put, asking for consent, sharing power, and *not* stealing content should be easy decisions to make. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it should be done.
ReproJobs: How would you redesign the strategy for organizations?
Natasha Vianna: Hire and pay creative people to produce creative content! If you’re managing an organization or brand that posts screenshots on Instagram, you now have a repository of talented, funny, and smart people with interesting things to say. Here’s a chance to hire people to help create content in a respectful and ethical way.
ReproJobs: How does it feel to see your content go viral? What happens in the aftermath? Do you gain anything from it?
Natasha Vianna: Today, most of my tweets are light and fun, so it’s exciting to see thousands of people relating to the posts. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to tweet about or organize digitally about the issues that are most important to me because of some really bad experiences. During some past campaigns, it’s felt overwhelming and exhausting to do so much work to design memes and posts to generate awareness of our messaging and mission, only to see the posts taken, edited, and repurposed without our consent. Our campaigns were regularly hijacked.
Truthfully, tweets and followers and virality don’t guarantee long-lasting funding for meaningful work. It’s often unpaid work, particularly for young people, people of color, queer people, and those who are the closest to the pain. For nearly 7 years, I experienced this first hand with our first viral social media campaign.
ReproJobs: The campaign you’re referring to is the #NoTeenShame campaign that launched in 2013 and gathered thousands of people in just a matter of days. What did you learn in the process of helping build this viral campaign?
Natasha Vianna: As a young person who felt excluded from the spaces that made decisions about my life and my future, I turned to a digital world where I could find and build a community of people with a shared experience and mission. In the early 2010s, when conferences still hosted “how to find hard-to-reach youth” workshops, social media felt like the only place we could go to find each other and tell our stories on our own terms. It was a place where young moms, like me, could talk about our journeys in ways that others weren’t willing to hear. We didn’t ask for a chance to speak, we filled their timelines.
Organizations and brands that amplified and supported us were crucial, and I’m so grateful for their help. But it was hard for some of the organizations and leaders to share power and give credit to the young people who led the work. I’ll never forget the pain of being a youth-led, unpaid movement and learning that well-funded organizations were replicating our content to fundraise, never including us in the process or even hiring any young moms to be leaders in their own space. To them, we were invisible and it was just Twitter and Tumblr content.
Slowly, our names were erased and national organizations were taking all of the credit. This is not empowering. This is the exact opposite of centering the people most impacted in the work. And instead of only working on the issues, we had to fight for our own dignity and respect along the way too.
ReproJobs: Is there a way for organizations and brands to respectfully post other people’s content on their social media channels, like Instagram?
Natasha Vianna: Of course. Do continue to elevate good content, but don’t erase or minimize creators! If you see content you want to republish, requesting permission is fast and easy. Send them a DM, tell them who you are, where the post is going, and confirm that you’ll tag them in the comments and in the post *and* not using the post in any ads, sponsored posts, or fundraising.
Finally, if you’re going to take someone’s content and turn it into a branded meme, keep their name in the post, ensure it’s visible, and yes, you still have to tag them in the photo and caption. If your organization likes to add logos or watermarks to other people’s content, don’t. The content isn’t yours. If you’re feeling the urge to slap your organization’s logo on it, reach out to the creator and see if they’d be interested in partnering on content or a campaign. Consent is sexy!
ReproJobs: Since brand accounts with millions of followers rely on users for their engagement, what additional advice would you give to users?
Natasha Vianna: Before sharing a viral meme or tweet on a brand’s Instagram account, take a moment to search for the original creator and share the original post from their account first. When you share an Instagram post from an organization or brand’s feed, the original creator doesn’t get any credit in the story or gain any engagement. Independent creators and artists use these metrics to apply for artist grants and fellowships, book proposals, paid brand partnerships, and other financial ways to pay the bills. Don’t deny them their metrics.
Equally important, take a look at the accounts you’re following, and make an informed choice about who you follow, engage with, and amplify. How many of these #GirlBoss organizations and brands are taking a page out of the #ToxicWhiteDude’s growth hacking strategy? How many are using art from creators of color to seem more into racial justice than they are? Be an engaged user!
ReproJobs: What are you most curious about right now?
Natasha Vianna: I’m curious about what Earth and Space will look like hundreds of years from now. So I’m trying to learn and better understand the pace of today’s space capitalism, lack of regulation, and how this will impact us and the next generations. Who will be sent to other planets as guinea pigs? Who gets a seat on the spaceship if the Earth begins to deteriorate? Who will be left behind when other planets are colonized?
ReproJobs: What’s a delicious meal you ate recently?
Natasha Vianna: During the pandemic, I’ve been rediscovering my relationship with food so nearly everything has felt a little more delicious than before. However, I recently made a pretty amazing coconut rice pudding that made my eyes roll to the back of my head. It’s a dessert, but desserts are important meals too. #RebrandDessertsAsMeals.
ReproJobs: What podcast are you into right now?
Natasha Vianna: I recently started listening to Rebel Eaters Club hosted by Virgie Tovar. Again, re-establishing a more gracious relationship with food has been an exciting journey so this podcast is perfect. Virgie and her guests have such deep, insightful conversations about food, body image, and weight discimination. There’s usually great food involved, like croissants in a recent episode, and I’m learning a lot about our bodies, wellness fads, and our complex relationship with nutrition.
Natasha Vianna is a marketer and writer living in San Francisco. Operating her own consulting practice, she works independently within the technology and health industries. Previously, she co-founded noteenshame.org, an award-winning campaign to reduce the stigma that negatively impacts young parents' access to support, education, and healthcare.