Whoever Instagram hires will have to navigate a tricky set of unofficial mores and ever-shifting politics. “We’ve never gone out to this community and given best practices,” says Charles Porch, Instagram’s head of global creative partnerships. For example, many Instagram meme accounts post images and videos without credit—technically a violation of one of Instagram’s core community guidelines, which says that users should “share only photos and videos that you’ve taken or have the right to share.” That guideline has been very unevenly enforced, and King said she sympathizes with people who have lost their accounts, many of whom try to stay on the right side of the company, but still inadvertently violate guidelines.

so my meme page got deleted with no warning, i’ve been pre screening everything i post to make sure it doesn’t violate ToS and i still get banned? @instagram @facebook #reactivatespicy — Ben (@spicymp4) July 26, 2019

Many of the biggest teen-run meme pages today post a mix of content ripped from TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, often without noting where it came from. Part of that is a reflection of changing conventions around intellectual property, and part of it is because proper credit is often not easy to give. Videos are stolen from Twitter, re-uploaded on TikTok, then shared on Reddit and Discord before making their way onto meme pages, whose owners sometimes swap content with each other in group chats. Some teen-run pages post up to 100 times per day to their feed—more if you include Instagram Stories. The people running them don’t have the time or the means to check where all that content comes from.

King and Porch both told me that they recognize that expectations around credit are changing, and King emphasized that she sees “inherent value in curation in addition to creation.” “Curation is a kind of creation. Within the right bounds, there can be a lot of value in finding gems and sharing them,” she said. The company hopes that hiring a meme liaison will help the platform evolve with those changes—and stop memers from viewing Instagram as the enemy. “It will be so important for a person in this role to connect more deeply with the teen accounts and other accounts we’re not aware of,” King said. Porch agreed. “I want to spend as much time on the big classic memers as the next generation memers,” he said. “They're the one who decide where this industry goes and we want to be part of that with them.”

To those saying they just repost others work, the same can be said of a TV news outlet. Yes I could spend all day on the internet looking for memes, but I don’t, I rely on a few IG’s to curate for me. These pages are a huge part of IG culture, sad to see them go — Jaden Harris (@JadenHarris95) July 27, 2019

Teenagers are skeptical. Lewis Weed, a 16-year-old who lost more than 1 million collective followers across several accounts in the latest purge, told me that an Instagram meme liaison would be worthwhile only if the person could act as a direct line of support for him and others like him. “All we ask is that Instagram tries to talk with us in some way instead of blowing us off and ignoring us,” he said. “It’s frustrating. If you’re going to destroy and take away someone’s hard work (for some, years of work) at least provide some reason for doing so instead of grouping us in with people who did something wrong just to punish us all, [a] huge majority of which have done nothing.”