 I don't take anything seriously and I find it hilarious when people try to take what I do very seriously. Aaron Reynolds is the creator of viral meme accounts like Swear Trek and Effin Birds, which features serene woodcut style renderings of birds paired with profane maxims like get some fucking popcorn at shit show time and someone should shove bees up your ass. I don't have to yell at people or punch the wall. I can make a bird very angry and put it on the internet and then feel great about it. In the lead up to the 2020 election, just as Reynolds Effin Birds Instagram was exploding, so was panic over so-called disinformation. Under pressure from lawmakers, tech platforms cracked down on content deemed unacceptable by their algorithms and human moderators. Reynolds is based in Canada, but 80% of his audience is American and Instagram determined that the Effin Birds account had run afoul of the platform's rules aimed at stopping foreign election interference. I needed to turn on location services because they were concerned about accounts that had a large reach and they wanted to make sure that people knew where those accounts were located and I was like okay they're you know they're looking for election misinformation and stuff like that and it's all images, they can't tell a meme with election disinformation from a picture of a bird and the word butt sauce. Instagram initially added a location label to all of Reynolds posts indicating his account was based in Canada and he proceeded as normal, but then the company permanently removed Effin Birds from its American explore page which is a recommended list of posts Instagram shows to users based on their preferences and the post's popularity site-wide. Effin Birds reach on the platform plummeted. On every post I would see that I would get somewhere between five and 10,000 views from the explore page and today I get zero on every post no matter how popular. So did Instagram abuse its market power by limiting Reynolds' ability to reach new audiences? I'm not owed their spotlight on their platform that's their platform but I think the hard part of it is having had that pulled because I'm a dirty foreigner kind of sucks you know. Reynolds distributes his content across multiple popular platforms to mitigate his risk. The reason that I'm on Instagram in the first place is because I was stressed out about something like that happening on Twitter. The algorithms are going to change and so if you put all your eggs in the basket of that algorithm you're screwed. Reynolds says that quirky outlets like his could never have found an audience before social media which is what led to the publication of his new book available now in hardcover, Effin Birds, a field guide to identification. Nobody wanted to put me on the radio or television and nobody wanted to publish a book until it was popular on Twitter. I'm not retreating to legacy media I'm just finding another platform and that platform is bookstores. Bookstores have been great you know there's there's this sort of magic of learning that if you get in good with like an indie book chain they'll sell a ton of your books because they love you. Like the number three seller behind Amazon and Barnes & Noble was a like Boston area chain called Newbury Comics. I was like who are these guys and can I send them all cakes. Reynolds says his experience with Instagram isn't an existential threat to his meme business but he does worry about the potential danger of allowing the government through explicit regulation or through its influence over tech companies to constrain online speech. If there's government involvement we'll have the same kind of problems will just be different or government mandated versions of those problems. I think it's funny that I'm lumped in with threats to democracy and I post pictures of birds and swear words.