Several high-profile Instagram accounts switch to private to avoid scrutiny when posting sponsored content for Bloomberg's campaign
The Bloomberg campaign is putting out more memes on private Instagram accounts — and running faster than Facebook can keep up.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The Bloomberg campaign's meme operation has been building since mid-February, when it began working with Meme 2020 — the group led by Jerry Media's CEO — to place sponsored posts on influential Instagram accounts, just as Facebook opened the door to influencer-sponsored content for political campaigns. BuzzFeed News quickly flagged the gap: those posts run with little oversight, and #sponsored labels are easy to miss.
Going private is the twist that closes the loop. Meme accounts had already discovered in 2018 that flipping to private was a growth tactic (the biggest meme accounts went private to gain followers); now the same switch serves a second purpose — hiding paid political posts from public view and from Facebook's own moderation queue.
First-order effects
Sponsored Bloomberg memes posted by private accounts sit largely outside Facebook's disclosure enforcement, since the platform's rule requiring clearly identified paid partnerships presumes publicly visible posts.
Journalists, researchers, and rival campaigns lose the ability to audit the full set of paid posts in real time, because private-account content requires an approved follow request to see.
Second-order effects
Other campaigns have a template to copy: rent established meme audiences through intermediaries like Meme 2020 and distribute behind privacy walls, undercutting whatever disclosure regime Facebook publishes.
Facebook faces mounting pressure to extend moderation and ad-transparency tooling into private accounts and DMs — territory its current political-ad rules don't cover — or concede that its oversight framework applies only to the public feed.
Third-order effects
If private-network distribution becomes standard campaign practice, political advertising regulation built around public posts and searchable ad libraries misses the channel where persuasion actually happens, forcing regulators to define disclosure obligations for closed networks.
Influencer marketing in politics consolidates around agencies that control account portfolios — the Jerry Media/Meme 2020 model — making a handful of meme brokers the gatekeepers of paid political reach on Instagram.
The trend: Political campaigning is migrating from public feeds into private influencer networks faster than platforms can extend their moderation and disclosure rules to match.
Facebook's latest response to the Bloomberg campaign's aggressive and unorthodox use of social media, which skirts transparency rules and exploits loopholes, is to say: we don't exactly know what's going on and Washington should tell us what to do: https://www.nytimes.com/... htt…
“We see people hiding behind the label of satire. You push something out, get a ton of press coverage, then when someone pushes you on it, you say it was ‘tongue-in-cheek’. You win on both levels.” - @cward1e https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Bloomberg is paying massively popular Instagram accounts to run memes, but the accounts aren't using the official tool for ad disclosures. Also, many accounts are “private” so journalists and others can't scrutinize the ads. Via @TaylorLorenz & @sheeraf https://www.nytimes.com/..…
The Bloomberg campaign is continuing its aggressive ad campaign on Instagram meme accounts. Facebook, which spent years preparing for the 2020 presidential elections, is scrambling to respond. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The Bloomberg campaign is flooding the internet with memes, outrage bait, and content that skirts the edge of disinformation. It's a form of pollution for what @wphillips49 calls our “information ecosystem”. Worse, it works. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
“Bloomberg's campaign has spent the last month unapologetically performing the digital equivalent of dumping buckets of fresh garbage into the trash fire that is internet discourse in 2020, apparently with little or no concern for the toxic side effects.” https://www.theguardian.…
This ☝🏻& the fact that many are being posted to private meme accts is what makes transparency in the branded content world all the more difficult + why these type of election ads need to live in some sort of searchable database, have some sort of oversight https://www.nytimes.com…
“The posts do not make use of Instagram's official system for disclosing that money has changed hands.” New from @TaylorLorenz & @sheeraf https://www.nytimes.com/...
A priceless story from @TaylorLorenz and @sheeraf ...you could not make this stuff up. It bears out a theory I've had for a while, that not enough execs in platform companies live very online lives - they don't know their own product https://www.nytimes.com/...
The Bloomberg campaign is releasing sponcon that flagrantly violate FB's branded content policies on private accounts with little to no oversight. A rare collab with @sheeraf! https://www.nytimes.com/...