Instagram is looking to employ a ‘meme liaison’ officer so that the social media giant can better understand one of the most unusual social media crazes.
Instagram just went through a bit of a clean-up, purging more than 142 high-profile meme accounts, the issue wasn’t the material itself but the way in which the page-runners procured their material.
Many of the memes posted to Instagram were fired ripped from places like Reddit and 4chan with no permission or credit, actions which abuse the internal processes rules of Instagram.
Among the removed pages was @memeextraordinaire, a page that had a following of over 40 million. The owner of this page was reported to have made more than US $600,000 in the page’s lifetime.
Removal of enormous pages like this caused a stir, even Lil Nas X piped up on the injustice of removing the internet’s favourite satirical art form.
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Clearly though Instagram has seen the dollar signs in this ‘industry’ as it now wants to control the memes for itself. Instagram is looking for a ‘meme liaison’, someone working as a ‘strategic-partnerships manager’ between meme accounts and digital publishers.
According to Instagram, the employee would “identify important new formats and trends while also serving memers already on the platform.” The plan is to police the upload of memes of Instagram and make it more marketable as a business opportunity for those looking for some Instagram advertising.
Speaking to The Atlantic, Lila King, head of news and publishing partnerships at Instagram, explained:
“We’ve seen, through the course of our work with publishers and creators, that the meme community has become really influential. 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 influenced the more traditional media companies.” According to King, the candidate will ideally be “equally fluent in the language of memes and the business of digital publishing.”
If memes is now a language, a lot more people out there may start putting ‘bi-lingual’ on their CVs.
