Content Repeaters Beware: Instagram Is Cutting Down on Reposting

For over a decade, meme accounts like Fuck Jerry, The Fat Jewish and My Therapist Says amassed millions of followers, racked in massive engagement rates and kept viewers giggling through aggregating funny content, putting their spin on it and posting it for the world to laugh and share.

Now, with Instagram's announcement that they'll begin removing reposted content in certain places, these meme accounts and others that rely on content generated by others face a changing digital landscape. Will they keep up, or become a relic of the mid-2010s? Here's what to know.

What’s Happening?

According to Instagram’s official blog, the mega-popular photo and video sharing app will begin removing reposted content from recommendations across the platform. In its place, Instagram will identify the original content through a series of visual and text cues, and put that original content in the explore tab; a move specifically designed to uplift the work of small creators. Boosting the place of small creators and giving them the chance to break through is the name of the game here – and lastly, Instagram will begin adding labels to reposted content, linking to the original creator.  

Why is this Happening?

Instagram’s popularity essentially opened up the floodgates to people easily downloading, screenshotting and sharing content with little to no attribution. This practice has spiraled for over a decade, becoming so commonplace that tools like Downloadgram have launched, allowing users a seamless way to download and reshare content with no attribution for free.  

How Does this Change Social Strategy?

This update means that reposted content will not be prioritized or seen in the explore tab, the section of Instagram curated distinctly for each user. Designed to attract, entertain and engage, explore tab content is highly valuable to brands and creators as it allows them to reach and acquire new qualified followers for free.  

Brands, creators and individuals need to post original content in order to succeed. And, with Instagram’s shift from highly-curated to less-polished and real, this should be an easy and welcome change. One source claims that accounts that share content that they didn’t “create or enhance in a material way” more than 10 times in 30 days will be penalized, so creators can use this as a loose guideline to still post user-generated content (UGC) when it makes sense and positively impacts their brand. Another strategy to use UGC is to partner with customers or creators for collab posts, which allows content to go onto multiple participating brand feeds.  

Instagram claims that it will serve original content to a small group of users, measure performance and then continue to serve content into the explore tab. Understanding the needs of followers and catering to those will help brands, creators and individuals push content into the explore tab, creating that “viral” nature seen most famously with TikTok, but now on the Instagram platform.  

So what does this mean for the Fuck Jerrys of the world? Get to creating, and re-share with care.