Posting memes on Instagram can lead to account suspension

If Instagram considers that a post or comment violates any of its community rules, it can proceed to suspend the offending account. In doing so, said profile is disabled and locked for an indeterminate period of time, even permanently. Although the affected user has the right to complain, even appealing to the platform’s own laws, their complaint may go unanswered. The ambiguity and vagueness of the Instagram community rules can lead to an account being suspended for posting a meme on their profile.

The ambiguity of the Instagram community rules can lead to a profile being suspended for posting a meme

A web page called “Deleted in 2020”, that is, “Deleted in 2020”, collects the images that have caused the suspension of the Instagram accounts of their authors. A quick glance at the photos gives you an idea of ​​the poor precision of the rules that regulate Instagram. Many of them are nude photos that are very different from each other. There are more and less explicit ones, and even drawings or photographs of photographs have been censored. Other images that incite suicide or violence are also included.

But among the canceled posts we also find a few memes, and not especially hurtful or sexual or violent. An example is this meme about the Twin Towers, which does not even make an explicit reference to the September 11 attack.

In fact, some meme-maker accounts on Instagram include in their bio a counter of days since they were last suspended. It is common for the Instagram algorithm to block these users for their posts, sometimes causing them to lose their account with tens of thousands of followers. And all this without actually having violated any of the rules of Instagram.

This past summer, an Instagram spokesperson said in an interview that the company was working to improve your content review system. As he explained in an interview to BuzzFeed News, they are aware of the damage that they can cause by suspending the account to their most popular users. For this reason, they are developing a new system so that suspensions are due only to justified reasons and in accordance with the laws of the platform.

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