Instagram looks to hire a strategic partnerships manager focused on meme accounts, following a series of meme account purges, the latest taking down 142 in July
and stop memers from viewing Instagram as the enemy.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Joel Price / @joelprice : imagine the person who gets this job explaining it to their parents mom: tell me what you do? king of meme accounts: 🤔 https://twitter.com/... Tyler Kruse / @tylahnol : I just yelled in the office “WE'RE MENTIONED IN A @TaylorLorenz ARTICLE! This is the peak of media coverage” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Katie Notopoulos / @katienotopoulos : The worst job in tech has to be the person at Instagram who deals with the complaints by teenagers who make money by posting screenshots of funny tweets to Instagram https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Mark Kern / @grummz : #WarOnMemes https://twitter.com/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : “According to a statistic provided by Instagram, meme content gets shared seven times more than non-meme content on the app.” https://twitter.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : “Curation is a kind of creation,” Instagram's Lila King explains. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : “Memes are a format that you're starting to see traditional media companies adopt more and more... We think if we can get to know and understand [the meme community] there is a lot to learn that can influence the more traditional media companies.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Some large teen-run pages post up to 100 times per day to their feed—more if you include Instagram Stories. They don't even remotely have the time or the means to check where all that content comes from. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Whoever Instagram hires for this role will have to navigate shifting norms around credit and cross-platform sharing. For every Fuck Jerry there are literally countless teen-run meme accts that give 0 credit when reposting https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Today, Instagram is announcing that it's looking to hire its first-ever strategic partnerships manager specifically to focus on meme accounts and what the company calls “digital publishers”. Ex Fuck Jerry, Comments by Celebs, Daquan, Betches, etc. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram spent early 2019 as the villain of the meme economy: coverage of accounts like @fuckjery framing the platform's meme-account boom as built on stolen content, and its recommendation algorithm drawing fire for amplifying extremist memes and misinformation. Its answer so far has been enforcement — culminating in the July purge of 142 accounts.
Hiring a strategic partnerships manager for memes flips the posture from purge to diplomacy, and lands just as Facebook tests its own LOL meme feed and meme influencers start hedging toward TikTok.
First-order effects
- Meme account operators gain a named inside contact at Instagram instead of facing enforcement sweeps like July's removal of 142 accounts with no formal channel.
- Instagram's partnerships team takes on the complaint workload that journalists described as unmanaged — teenagers monetizing reposted screenshots with nowhere to escalate.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's LOL experiment and Instagram's outreach point the same direction: the meme supply that grew organically on Instagram is becoming a formally sourced content category inside Meta rather than an tolerated side effect.
- Multi-platform meme brands already investing in TikTok get added leverage — a dedicated Instagram liaison raises the cost of letting those relationships sour.
Third-order effects
- Platform governance shifts from periodic purges to managed creator relations: if the hire works, expect enforcement waves to be preceded by partnership programs across other informal content genres.
- The move legitimizes meme aggregation as an industry role, forcing the unresolved attribution question from the @fuckjerry-era coverage — who owns a joke — into business negotiations between platforms and aggregators.
The trend: Platforms are converting informal creator communities they once policed by purge into formally managed partner ecosystems, with meme accounts as the template case.