The Great Meme Purge of 2019

2^nd August 2020

On the night of 25th July 2019 some of the most well known Instagram meme pages were suspended all at once for supposedly breaking the community guidelines. The suspension of a meme account was nothing new on the site by that point but such a large and rapid ban was unheard of. Their followers woke up to confusing posts from their back up accounts desperately trying to regroup and rebuild their lost follower bases.

Of course, these types of memes weren't exclusive to Instagram, the bulk of the content actually came from Reddit's r/dankmemes and r/comedyheaven among many others whilst much of riskier content came from either the now restricted r/edgymemes subreddit or straight from LiveLeak and Best Gore. Instagram, however did not stay tolerant for long and by 2018 account suspensions were common for meme pages.

Sometime in mid July 2019, Facebook led by Mark Zuckerburg (zucc the cuck) decided to quietly update their account suspension guidelines. At the time, there were around 50 or so decently sized meme pages that reposted original content from the smaller content creators. While this system may not have been particularly fair since credit was rarely given, it was what made such the community stick out from the more mainstream larger "meme" pages such as @daquan or @memes which mostly stuck to posts you'd expect to see on Facebook.

By the 25th a several large pages fitted the criteria for suspension and so the purge began. It wasn't long before theories emerged about why such a thing had happened. Was it the increasing number of offensive posts getting taken down? Perhaps it was the subtle political bias that had existed on these pages during the 2016 US elections.

Above, is an approximate list of the pages that were taken suspended. Keep in mind this wasn't by viewed as a huge tragedy to many Instagram OC creators as although these pages had distributed their content to large audiences, their follower counts would go up, the same rang out to smaller meme pages and followers who were tired of payed promotions and ads that were allowing the large meme account admins to profit off their views and time.

Among other reactions was the famous "my business is ruined" copypasta made by some ex edgelord memepage admin crying about how his audience to feed his payed promotions to was gone.

Retaliation: The World's Largest Raid

It wasn't long before many of the affected pages and their followers began to plan ways to seek revenge over the purge. An account called @worlds_largest_raid popped up a few days later and announced a planned comment raid on Instagram's page which would take place on the 15th August. Some accounts also changed their profile pictures to light green circles, in "solidarity" although that quickly became cringey began to get mocked.

The raid itself was nothing special. People spammed #freethememes in the vain hope that Instagram would respond however no such reaction occured. Based on the number of likes on such comments it's safe to say at least 400 accounts were involved. After about five hours the momentum was lost and Instagram carried on its normal account activity as if nothing had happened. @worlds_largest_raid soon devolved into a meme page of sorts and changed its name.

Despite the divide in opinion, it changed alot about the community. The edgier content was toned down and continued only on private accounts. Not many of the accounts returned and even fewer did with the same content or names. This didn't mean the end for these types of pages but to some who I've spoken to it's hard not to see it as a symbolic end to the initial 2016 era of openly edgy and offensive memes on Instagram. Nothing more can be said, the rules have changed.