Instagram is Killing Off Meme Accounts
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Network effect
13 min read
The author explicitly discusses how network effects work both 'up' and 'down' for social platforms, arguing that decreased engagement creates a cascading effect. Understanding this economic concept illuminates why platform policy changes can have outsized consequences.
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Deplatforming
15 min read
While the article discusses content restriction rather than outright bans, it engages with the broader phenomenon of platforms limiting reach and visibility. Deplatforming as a concept—its effectiveness, controversies, and political implications—provides important context for the author's concerns about asymmetric impacts on progressive voices.
As those who follow me know, this isn’t a typical post for me—there’s certainly more important things going on. But unfortunately it impacts me personally, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and think there are larger ramifications that extend beyond mere entertainment.
This summer, Instagram updated its policies, and in particular is now cracking down on so-called “duplicate” content—photos and videos reposted directly on the feed (vs. shared on stories or using their recently launched “repost” feature). Many of my favorite accounts on Instagram are these exact type of meme accounts: ones that curate roundups of various types of content, typically crediting the original creators in both the text body and through tagging. While it’s impossible for me to get my hands on Instagram’s exact numbers, my assumption is that this ecosystem is, on balance, a win-win—helping both the meme page grow its audience and pointing that audience toward the original creators.
While my primary accounts, @jessedamiani and @urgentfuturespod, are not meme accounts exactly, I’ve participated in this fashion as well. It’s a way for me to exercise my curatorial chops in a lightweight way, drawing together various forms of content that include actual news, memes, silly videos, and lefty political content in 5-20 slide carousels. I view this act of curation as “transformative” in itself; even though I’m not changing the original pieces of content, by situating them together in one post, I’m attempting to capture a mood, share information, and implicitly contextualize current events.
Sometimes, these have done quite well, garnering tens and hundreds of thousands of views. Here’s a recent example:
Last week, I received a notification that my reach had been restricted to only my followers—none of my content would now show up on Reels, the Explore page, or anywhere else non-followers might otherwise find my content. This would persist, the notification explained, until I removed the content in question. It includes essentially everything in the meme batch linked above and several others.
While I’ve had isolated instances of content being auto-flagged because of rights issues (typically related to the music used in the video), I’ve never experienced something this overt. Across my feed, other accounts I follow, like @postp0stpost and abnormalize.being, to name just a couple, are bemoaning receiving similar notifications. To get a sense of what an account
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