Instagram is Shutting Down Highly Followed Meme Pages, leaving Admins Outraged!

And to everyone’s shock, Instagram has been on a massive “meme page purge” for the last 2 nights. Highly followed Meme accounts (some with over 10 million followers) were deleted without any sort of warnings or explanations. Although, a few days ago, Instagram announced a new account disabling policy and a feature to help users understand if their accounts are at the risk of being removed, yet, ostensibly, the Facebook-owned app is not ready to implement its new guidelines. The extensive list of deleted accounts includes @yerdank, @thespedshed, @uniquevines and many more. The news was broken by Taylor Lorenz of The Atlantic.

The sudden deletion of such accounts has got other Instagram Meme Page Admins worried. The lack of a clear context behind this move has led people to speculate various possibilities behind the purge.

Most of the people, including Social Media App researcher Jane Manchun Wong, believe copyright infringement to be the main reason behind the huge deletion spree. It is common knowledge that most meme pages use recycled content from other sources and the fact that they are able to earn through rehashed content might have ticked off Instagram.

People were also quick to link the ban to political reasons. According to multiple users, the ban was a part of the pre-election purge. Also, a Twitter user pointed out that Left Wing Social Media has been taking strict action against anti-left wing content for quite some time now. If that turns out to be the reason, there will be a lot of questions raised, since Facebook and its suite of services claim to be supporters of free speech.

Undisclosed advertisement can be yet another strong reason behind Instagram’s controversial move. Many of these meme pages posted advertisements catering to the adult audience without disclosing the deal they had made with the brands.



Until Instagram provides an official explanation, it is better to assume that the deletion spree was long overdue, courtesy of the above mentioned issues accumulating. Additionally, the “edgy” content of these pages might have led to several of their posts being reported as well and that could have played a role in the entire fiasco.

If you run an Instagram page and are concerned about losing it, it is better to keep the content original, politically neutral and ensure that any kind of brand deals you are entertaining fall in line with Instagram’s guidelines.

Update, July, 28, 2019: Facebook informed media outlets that these meme accounts were removed from Instagram following multiple violations of policies and terms, including attempted abuse of Instagram's internal processes.

Read next: How Celebrity Social Media Activity Can Lead to Fraud

Featured Photo: Thomas Trutschel Photothek / Getty Images

6 Comments

  1. I wish people would quit using words like "guideline" to describe the rules. "Dictates" would be more accurate as Instagram has just demonstrated.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ive been reporting a shit ton of these accounts. One for spam and two for the ones selling crap. Do i care? No. Car pages keep spamming these cgi’d bs and go “real or fake?” I dont even take the time to watch the full thing before i report it. Im hoesntly glad insta is FINALLY doing something about this.

    ReplyDelete
  3. YESSSSSS I'm so sick of those stupid ads they post all the time

    ReplyDelete
  4. Forget about area 51. Let's raid Instagram

    ReplyDelete
  5. uninstalled instagram on every devices, see yall

    ReplyDelete
  6. Why doesn't Instagram instead pay attention to the millions of bots send children and adults porn viruses

    ReplyDelete
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