Many early Web 2.0 scholars held high hopes for Instagram. Unlike the rigid perceptions of gender reinforced through traditional media, social network sites (SNS) were heralded as a space where harmful gender norms could be challenged, dismantled, and eradicated. However, cultural and institutional filters embedded within Instagram communities are having quite the opposite effect, instead reinforcing and reproducing existing hegemonic gender stereotypes, inhibiting the formation of group and individual identities that fall outside of existing gender norms, mirroring offline inequalities, and slowing the progress of fourth wave feminism. Read more [...]