Instagram is Killing Off Meme Accounts
For years, Instagram has been an ideal platform for meme creators to build community. But new policies are destroying that capacity. Here's why I think that's a major miscalculation.
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 like POSTPOSTPOST is trying to accomplish, check out my conversation with founder Al Hassan Elwan on the Urgent Futures Podcast:
This might seem like a frivolous thing—and I can’t completely dismiss that critique—but on the other hand, there are stakes to this. If you’re like me, you rely on accounts like this for key cultural, social, and political commentary. They are essentially alternative “news” sources—if we broaden our understanding to understand news outside of traditional media. While these accounts don’t often produce original content (“OC”), their orientation to information and curatorial efforts serves as helpful filter through which to process news and information.
In some cases, this is simply entertainment. In others, these roundups operate at multiple levels, both bringing joy and making implicit arguments about life, the universe, and everything. A great example in this regard is Bradley Rydholm’s superb @nature_is_not_metal, which is not only a great place to encounter examples of human-animal and animal-animal cooperation, but an account that foregrounds necessary ideas like animism, non-dualism, etc.
Likewise, Taylor Lorenz’s @taylorlorenz3.0 is not only a great account to visit for a laugh, but a destination for news and hot takes in digital culture. Of course, there are loads more accounts like this, each that provide multiple layers of value along their respective niches.
Why This Matters
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has explained that this policy change is designed to reduce “spam” and “low-quality behavior,” and incentivize “originality.” I can understand this core motivation, but they’re taking it way too far—and in the process making a huge mistake.
I’ll grant that there are plenty of accounts that are just posting individual viral videos as their own, without crediting the original creators, and that this might detract from engagement that should be going to the original creators. While I’m not altogether convinced even by that argument, I can at least see how Instagram believes that removing this behavior will benefit the platform.
But it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, decapitating a thriving meme community that, for many of us, is among the primary reasons (if not the primary reason) that we spend time on Instagram in the first place.
Where this is perhaps most urgent has to do with issues of justice and equity. These meme accounts are routinely the first places where I encounter recordings of atrocities committed in Gaza and Sudan, critical climate news, and curated commentary on U.S. politics (especially from voices often excluded from mainstream sources)—to say nothing of the creators I’ve discovered and followed through exposure to their talents in these venues, folks from across the spectrum of comedy, music, dance, art, and otherwise.
The more cynical part of me wonders if this newfound crackdown by Instagram—after years of benefiting from this type of content—is an effort to cut off these communities in a bid to further appeal to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
Certainly there are right-wing memers who will suffer under this policy shift, but I believe the impacts will be felt much more acutely among progressive accounts. Why? Well, in the contemporary Western media ecosystem, the spectrum of what we consider mainstream has vanishingly little representation of leftist perspectives (yes, even on MSNBC) and the firsthand content that inherently links to these political views. A quick example of this in practice: compare the coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which certainly deserved the coverage it got, and ultimately didn’t even receive enough of it!) and Israel’s of Gaza (which was equally as deserving, but received a fraction of the coverage). For many of us, Instagram was the primary vehicle by which we could get a real sense of what was happening on the ground in Gaza.
Right-leaning views (and recently, even right-wing extremism), on the other hand, are increasingly platformed, both in “mainstream media” and a bevy of more fringe outlets. So even if there are an equivalent number of meme accounts across the political spectrum who will be hit by this change equally, the role that left-leaning accounts play in the news ecosystem is proportionally greater for their respective communities.
For this reason, as well as the simple engagement/entertainment quotient, this move feels like a massive mistake for Instagram. We no longer live in the age where social media participation is a given. Look no further than X, which has seen a large-scale exodus since Elon Musk assumed ownership, driving tens of millions to Bluesky. It’s not just users deleting accounts, it’s also the “quiet quitting” aspect—a route that I’ve taken, alongside many of my peers, in which we leave our accounts intact so that they can’t be usurped, but we rarely or never use them.
Will there be a mass exodus from Instagram? Probably not. But I can imagine that this move will decrease the amount of time many of us actually want to spend on the platform. Given Instagram’s business model, decreased time-on-platform—even if we all keep our accounts—hits their bottom line. Just as network effects scale “up” when social media platforms are acquiring users—the more people who join, the more people feel like they have to be there—so too do they work “down”; the less time people spend on the platform, the less time that people will collectively spend on it, as it won’t be where they can find the types of content they prefer to engage with.
Of course, I could certainly be wrong here. I thought Netflix’s choice to crack down on shared accounts would cause more flight from the streamer than it ultimately did. From a financial standpoint, that’s proven effective. Likewise, maybe Instagram’s hypothesis about original content will prove out—frustrating people in the short term, but fostering enough ongoing interest that users don’t ultimately spend more time on other platforms. It seems like a risky bet to me, and worse: an unnecessary one. Time will tell; all I know is I’m bummed that my own experience of the platform has just been massively downgraded, and moreover that we’re experiencing yet another attack on the ability for key left-leaning content and information to circulate.
To that end, most of my work is already here on Substack, and I’m now more incentivized than ever to start bringing my meme roundups to Notes, so if you’re not already subscribed to Reality Studies or following my personal account, here’s your chance:
Thanks for this great read. It was wonderfully edifying about memes and the battlefield they’re now sadly entangled in.