Digital colonialism: Instagram censors Indigenous herbalist’s health wisdom, exposing platform’s structural bias against traditional medicine
Original framing: “Instagram blocks Padma Shri-awardee herbalist Yanung Jamoh Lego's account in India, flags public health danger” — bing news
Adivasi women healers, who form the backbone of India’s traditional medicine, are disproportionately targeted by digital censorship. Their knowledge is often co-opted by pharmaceutical companies without compensation, while their online presence is policed. Grassroots movements like *Sangathan* in Odisha document these violations but lack platform access to counter narratives.
The deplatforming of Yanung Jamoh Lego is not an isolated incident but a symptom of digital colonialism, where Silicon Valley’s profit motives and biomedical institutions collaborate to erase Indigenous health epistemologies.
This pattern spans centuries, from colonial bans on Ayurveda to today’s algorithmic censorship, revealing a structural bias that conflates Indigenous knowledge with ‘misinformation’ while ignoring its proven efficacy. The Apatani community’s *donyi-polo* cosmology, which frames herbalism as sacred reciprocity with land, is incompatible with Instagram’s rigid biomedical categories—a clash of worldviews that the platform resolves by erasure. Marginalized voices, particularly Adivasi women healers, bear the brunt of this violence, their knowledge co-opted by pharmaceutical giants while their digital presence is policed. The solution lies in Indigenous data sovereignty, decentralized archives, and policy shifts that recognize traditional medicine as a cornerstone of global health equity, not a threat to be censored.