Original art from Gemma Correll's Instagram account.
Last week, Instagram stunned at least 30 meme accounts, with a combined 33 million following, after shutting down their accounts for allegedly breaking community guidelines.
“These accounts were disabled following multiple violations of our policies, including attempted abuse of our internal processes,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Daily Dot in an email statement. Often, the default reasoning for shutdowns of meme accounts is copyright complications.
Account purges like this aren’t new for Instagram. In December 2014, the company deleted hundreds of thousands of accounts in what became the “Instagram rapture,” according to The Atlantic, and another round of removals occurred in December of 2018.
“Almost every day I see accounts repost my work without credit or, worse still, cutting off my signature and even adding their own logo onto my work,” cartoonist Gemma Correll told me. “I like it when people repost my work. One of the best things about social media is the ability to share things you like with others. As long as my signature remains on my work, I don’t get too fussy about crediting although, obviously, I prefer it if people do.”
Correll, who was recently featured on Instagram’s main account, is among the many cartoonists and original content creators on the platform that battle for the rights to their content.
“I’ve had so many instances of people cutting my name off, denying me credit, etc.,” artist Beth Evans told me. “Sometimes people will put your name back up, but I’ve had plenty of people delete my polite comment asking for credit and then block me.”
If she gets blocked, Evans resorts to reporting the account, but she likes to use that as a "last resort."
As for Instagram’s responsibility to secure owners’ rights to original content on their platform, they meet it with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which, according to Jeff Becker, a partner at Haynes and Boone, LLP, is all they need to do.
“You have to provide a mechanism for owners to report violations, so it puts the responsibility on the owners,” Becker told me. “That’s what all of them [social media companies] do and legally they don’t need to do much more.”
When asked if Instagram should implement a direct sharing capability like Twitter and Facebook have with retweeting and sharing, respectively, Becker told me, “It would definitely help. That way you’re not copying it anymore. You’re providing a link. But do they have to? I don’t think they have an obligation, legally.”
Generally, the original content creators interviewed all agreed that Instagram shutting down rule-breaking accounts is a good thing.
“I’m pleased that Instagram is shutting down accounts that break the community guidelines. I dislike the sense of entitlement that some accounts seem to have about art and ‘content,’” Correll told me. “Artists and creators work hard and often share work multiple times a week for free. It’s not fair for an account that essentially just copy-pastes images from Reddit to make money from somebody else’s hard work.”
But Evans feels Instagram could do more to verify accounts in order to ensure people know credible accounts over fake ones. "I think verifying people on Instagram is important because of the sheer number of times I have received messages that read , 'I didn't know it was you making all those comics.' By having the check mark, it definitely lets people know you're the content creator!"
