This Saturday morning, when the journalist and writer Cristina Fallarás went to open her Instagram account, she couldn’t. The Meta application had been closed without any explanation beyond a message warning her that she had to take “the necessary measures” or she would lose “access.” It happened five days after, through that same account, Fallarás made public an anonymous testimony from a woman who claimed to have been a victim of sexist violence by a politician. At no time and in no case did he publish any name, but just three days later Íñigo Errejón, Sumar’s parliamentary spokesperson until then resigned, He handed in his deputy certificate, acknowledged the facts and abandoned institutional politics. A few hours later, early this Saturday afternoon, the account was reactivated again. Fallarás has stated that the director of Meta has called her to apologize and explained that it was closed due to a “flood of complaints”, but that the company has decided to reopen it.

This Saturday, Fallarás only received the following message: “Your Instagram account has been suspended because it or the activity on it does not comply with our community standards.” It was added that if she believed they had made a mistake, she had until April 24 of next year to appeal the decision. She did, but on the phone she then admitted to being “very worried.” He pointed out that he posted the testimony as always, “without giving names, ever.” She has been doing it for a year and three months on that Instagram account (@cfallaras, now active again): stories from women who narrate sexual violence, psychological violence, economic violence, physical violence and all those forms of sexist violence that they suffer every day. And he has done it “non-stop, every day.”

She accumulates thousands of testimonies in her account because, she has also explained in a video that she has sent through her messaging networks, “many women do not dare to narrate them in judicial, police or media instances.” And “for that very reason it is useful”, because what could have remained untold, without existing, appears: “They are stories that are spread, they can be echoed by the press, the media, and above all, women see themselves recognized.” in the stories of others and we learn that there is neither fear nor shame, that we can tell ourselves.”

“It is not a question of a basic algorithm, it is not a coincidence that it happens after publishing a testimony that ends with the resignation of a politician and I begin to publish others that refer to politicians and journalists, always without giving the name, always,” he reflected. on the phone about this second closure, before the account was reopened. Because it is not the first time that Meta sent him that message. On March 1, it also appeared when opening the application for “publication of inappropriate content.” “There was a massive protest [en redes] that arrived in the EU, and they reopened it on March 8,” she recalled.

Once his account was reopened this Saturday, through his messaging networks, Fallarás sent the following message: “Dear ones, the director of Meta called me to apologize. It has been closed due to a barrage of complaints (for whatever reason…) and they have reopened it. Thank you all very much for your support. We continue.”

What happened to him this Saturday also happened on March 1. Although this time only for a few hours. Fallarás has feared that, if the account is not returned, part of the contentThe thousands of stories of women that it keeps will be lost forever: “It is not that there has been a complaint and they will suspend it until they see what happens.” [algo que le ocurre cada cierto tiempo]It is a closure, a disqualification, I appeal as I have already done, and they can give it to me or not give it to me and all of this disappears.” She saves these testimonials, making backup copies, but it is a huge job due to the volume and, by doing it periodically, there may be a proportion of them that if Instagram does not rehabilitate her account, she cannot recover. There are hundreds of messages in that account that I had not yet read.

“From there, we have to ask ourselves if the silence that is imposed on us is so brutal that it reaches the closing of accounts where the only thing that is done is to give women a voice,” said Fallarás. She also insists that she publishes testimonies, “not complaints.” Her account, for more than a year, had become a safe space for those women who wanted to tell about the violence they had suffered, but the creation of that immense archive of testimonies – in which she always anonymized the names of both the women like the men they talk about in the cases in which they name them—it was not an idea out of nowhere.

On April 26, 2016, The Provincial Court of Pamplona handed down the first sentence about La Manada: sexual abuse with a penalty for the five men who abused an 18-year-old girl during the first night of San Fermín in 2016. That same afternoon, Fallarás published a post on X (formerly Twitter) with a hashtag: #Cuéntalo. Between that day and May 9, around 790,000 women – the vast majority, although there were also men – wrote almost three million tweets telling, sharing their story.

At that time, Fallarás gave this massive response a definition: “A new collective memory never before narrated.” With “overwhelming” numbers and it didn’t look like Me too because there was “no one known” behind it. For her it was a horizontal jet. “Believing or not believing is a conscious act, and neither men nor justice were believing their story.” [se refería con aquellas palabras a la víctima de La Manada]. And partly it is because this common narrative does not exist. I decided that I had to call people to tell it,” the writer argued at that time.

Since then, the tell it It has continued to work. She left And this Saturday, during the hours in which her account remained closed, she stated that if the account did not return, those stories would exist somewhere else: “Because it is an attack against the voice of women, the voice of all, what is done It is imposing silence again. They are not going to silence us, if it is not in mine, they will be told, we will be told, in those of many, because we are all in this.”