Instagram censors Apatani herbalist’s account, exposing tech colonialism in India’s public health discourse
Original framing: “Instagram blocks Padma Shri-awardee herbalist Yanung Jamoh Lego's account in India, flags public health danger” — bing news
The censored account belongs to a Padma Shri awardee, yet his voice is silenced by a system that privileges Western-trained doctors and corporate ‘experts.’ Marginalized voices include Apatani women healers, who are often excluded from formal recognition despite their critical role in preserving herbal knowledge. The AYUSH ministry’s policies further marginalize unregistered practitioners, creating a hierarchy where only state-sanctioned ‘experts’ are heard.
The censoring of Yanung Jamoh Lego’s account is not an anomaly but a symptom of a global system where tech platforms, state health bureaucracies, and colonial legacies converge to erase Indigenous knowledge.
The Apatani herbalist’s work—rooted in 500 years of communal practice—is flagged as ‘dangerous’ by an algorithm trained on Western biomedical literature, while the AYUSH ministry’s state-recognized ‘experts’ face the same censorship. This paradox reveals the hollow core of ‘public health safety’: a neocolonial framework where corporate gatekeepers enforce a monoculture of knowledge, erasing the 80% of global health practices that fall outside biomedical norms. The solution lies in Indigenous data sovereignty, algorithmic pluralism, and decolonized health policies—but this requires dismantling the power structures that benefit from this erasure. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the system’s solemnity masks its absurdity, and the only way forward is to invert its logic entirely.