No-Tory-ous: Tory Lanez’s Instagram Saga

Champaign, III. – Quarantine has given rise to several new online sensations, from rapidly changing TikTok challenges to Joe Exotic and the wild documentary starring him, Tiger King.

One such sensation, Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Radio has gained notoriety of its own, so much so that Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri had to suspend the viral radio show last week. The content itself was deemed inappropriate, which, given some of the content (which shall not be mentioned here, but can be found all over Twitter and YouTube) is totally fair.

“Quarantine Radio is great, so shout out to Tory Lanez for that,” Mosseri said in an Instagram Live interview with The Shade Room. “The lives have been great, the lives with the fans have been great. But you can’t have nudity on Instagram.”

Under normal circumstances, perhaps the social media site would be more lenient on its content restrictions. But the sometimes raunchy entertainment that made Quarantine Radio so viral was becoming impossible to address, especially when an influx of people are on their phones and using the app. At the peak of it’s popularity (which is still arguably now), Quarantine Radio was bringing in views at record numbers.

Of course this didn’t stop Lanez at all. Like every social media user, the instant his account got suspended he just made a new one, and pulled in over 27,000 new followers in just one minute. As of today, the account @thequarantineradio has over 164,000 followers.

Lanez’s Quarantine Radio has included guest appearances from a number of celebrities and artists such as Timbaland, Chris Brown, Drake, DMX and more. After his lengthy calls he engages the fans (sort of) and allows them to join his call for the “twerking segment”.

Mosseri said that while he was a fan of Lanez and didn’t particularly have any problem with the “radio show” and its content, there were two separate occasions where the app’s developers had to shut the stream down.

Rapper Royce Da 5’9″ and host of The Breakfast Club Charlamagne Tha God spoke out against the ban, and not long after new fans of the show went ballistic with the hashtag #FreeTory going viral on Twitter.

“There’s a short period of time where you can’t go live again. We have to stick to the rules otherwise why do we have them? But generally, big fan of Tory Lanez, big fan of Quarantine Radio, but no nudity! We can’t have that.”

The ban would not last long however, as the account has been reactivated since last Friday. When he returned, Lanez said that executives lifted his ban early because new mixtape New Toronto 3 was “so good”.

Nevertheless, the goal of Quarantine Radio, which was to promote the mixtape in the first place, has definitely been achieved. On Sunday the rapper took to his Instagram to thank his fans for 60,000 unit sales and counting, and has put out Quarantine Radio merchandise on his personal website.