Instagram Did A Meme Purge And This Is The Reason

So, Instagram did a meme purge and ended up surprising a lot of users. You see, the photo-sharing platform shocked people worldwide when they decided to take down several meme accounts. Moreover, they didn’t provide any explanation as to why exactly they did such a thing. 

At least not at first, anyway. In fact, all “memers” could see when trying to access their profiles was that their accounts had been terminated due to the violation of Instagram policies. Evidently, this led the owners of meme sites to go nuts and complain over Twitter. 

In total, Instagram deleted 142 high profile meme accounts. That adds up to literally millions of followers, and of course tons of money lost forever.

The Reason Behind The Purge 

Initially, Instagram didn’t give any kind of explanation as to why they took the decision of deleting hundreds of meme pages. But, after those who were affected started complaining, a Facebook spokesperson went on to release a statement justifying Instagram’s actions.

Apparently, the users whose accounts were deleted had committed the mistake of violating Instagram’s policies. “These accounts were disabled following multiple violations of our policies, including attempted abuse of our internal processes.”

But, this isn’t where it ends. The main reason as to why so many Instagram meme accounts were deleted has to do with the fact that they were directly copying memes from Reddit. 

What People Had To Say

Evidently, this meme purge outraged 142 people (A.K.A the page owners). In fact, some of them decided to complain about the situation on Twitter. For example, one of the affected accounts – @memeextraordinaire-  tweeted this:

Fortunately, general users were more than supportive of Instagram’s decision. As a matter of fact, many people commented on the tweet from above asking the creator what he was expecting. “I hate stolen meme pages, and this honestly brings a smile to my face,” one user said. 

The fact of the matter is that there will always be new Instagram meme accounts for us to enjoy. So, if Instagram took down pages for copying other people’s content, we’re okay with that.

Note

Instagram has removed hundreds of meme accounts. However, we can still enjoy some pretty good memes on the platform. As a matter of fact, there are still thousands of accounts we can follow. And the best part is that they do create original content. 

Finally, there’s a rumour that Instagram might be planning to hire a sort of “Meme Liaison”. We don’t know much yet. But, it seems that the person in charge would be responsible for getting both digital publishers and meme creators to connect. Hopefully, this will reduce the “copying memes from Reddit to add them to Instagram” problem.