On July 29, 2019, dozens of popular meme accounts with a combined total of over 30 million followers were deleted by Instagram. The users were outraged with no explanation to comfort them for their lost accounts; they only received a message informing them that their account was suspended with no reason why.

   Instagram made a public comment around two days after the ban wave: “These accounts were disabled following multiple violations of our policies.“ Account owners themselves only received a message confirming that the account was disabled for not following guidelines.

   One meme page owner was using her account to pay for her college tuition. She was making about $30,000 dollars every 6 months which was a good salary, especially from an Instagram account. She had such a good salary that she quit her normal job to manage her account.

   Instagram claimed that popular meme pages were attempting to abuse their policies with intentions of making money. Most accounts sold shout-outs to smaller pages for around $30-$50 each. People started complaining as most normal accounts were also losing a large amount of followers in addition to the banning wave.

   Pages would advertise other accounts that gave them money by posting ads that would show some video or picture that would grab people’s attention such as compilations showing dangerous things such as pouring lemon juice

in their eyes or jumping off bridges into water. People find others being injured funny. The captions of the ads usually say “I found @account, follow @account”, or “this is the craziest person on Instagram. Follow @account.” Most of these accounts just post the same videos for ads as well.

   Almost every account that posted any ads were deleted. Around 9 out of every 10 ad posting accounts were banned with a few exceptions; such as @i_have_no_memes__96_v2 and @Sucward. One user was running two accounts and only posted ads on one; both were still deleted.

   Instagram user Ben, better known as “@Spicymp4” was earning $4,000 a month from his page. “I don’t have another job,” Ben said “as Instagram paid in one week what I would get in one month of an actual job.” He knew that it wasn’t going to last forever but didn’t think it was going to end so soon. 

   The accounts that were banned without warnings were outraged as their account are lost forever with no way to get them back. They didn’t receive any warning before their million follower accounts were deleted. The owner of two extremely popular meme pages had amassed over 24 million followers.

   One user made a statement on his third Instagram account named “@UmCaige.” He complained publicly about the issue. “@instagram you just deleted all of my accounts for absolutely no reason, no warning, and no context behind this.” He added that his two accounts combined had a total of 30 million followers. Somebody running two extremely popular accounts would be making about $400 dollars a day. 

   Right now, Instagram is currently ignoring all of the complaints by their users. Everywhere over other social platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Discord, people are commenting on Instagram’s mistake; so right now the entire Instagram situation is extremely popular on all platforms and they are at the center of hate.

   Instagram hasn’t made any comments on the situation and account owners doubt they will. The people who lost their accounts won’t be able to get their accounts back in the future since their accounts were completely deleted. Many people on other platforms don’t think Instagram will do anything in the future to correct their actions. It seems that account owners won’t be getting their pages back.