Some of the biggest meme accounts on Instagram have gone private in recent months as their owners say it's a new way to gain followers on a crowded platform
Over the past six months, some of Instagram's biggest meme pages—like Shithead Steve, with more than 2.5 million followers … Tweets: @thekarachikid Tweets: Khaver Siddiqi / @thekarachikid : “People go private because they get more followers when a follower sends a post to their friends and that person has to follow the account in order to see.” Why Instagram Stars are locking their account: http://www.theatlantic.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram's biggest meme pages spent years under fire — New York Magazine called out accounts like @fuckjerry for building audiences on stolen jokes and videos, and Instagram followed with a July purge that took down 142 meme accounts before moving to hire a strategic partnerships manager focused on meme accounts. Going private is the owners' answer to both problems at once: a crowded feed where organic reach is scarce, and a public profile that invites scrutiny.
The mechanic is simple and self-reinforcing — when a follower shares a post, the recipient must follow the locked account to view it, converting every send into a potential new follower. It also prefigures what came later: by 2020 political operatives were flipping accounts private to dodge scrutiny over sponsored posts, and by 2023 average users were retreating from influencer-swamped feeds into closed, private posting altogether.
First-order effects
- Meme account owners like Shithead Steve (2.5M+ followers) get a built-in growth loop: each shared post forces non-followers to hit follow just to view it, turning existing fans into an acquisition channel.
- Locked accounts lose discoverability through Explore and hashtag surfaces, so owners are trading public-feed distribution for follower-locked sharing.
Second-order effects
- Instagram faces a governance wrinkle: it had just moved to formalize ties with meme accounts via a partnerships hire after the purges, and mass privatization makes those accounts harder to moderate, measure, and monetize through standard brand tools.
- Brands buying meme-page reach now face gated audiences they cannot preview publicly, pushing sponsored-content deals toward accounts that stay open — or toward verification of private accounts' claimed numbers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, growth on saturated social platforms shifts from public virality to share-gated access loops — a structural turn already visible in the 2023 migration of ordinary users to private posting and closed groups.
- Platform metrics built around public reach (follower counts, impressions) become less trustworthy signals of influence, pressuring Instagram and advertisers toward new ways of valuing closed-network audiences.
The trend: As feeds saturate with professionalized content, growth and even everyday posting are migrating from public broadcast to gated, share-driven private networks — with meme accounts as early adopters of the mechanic.