Instagram’s War with Cannabis Continues

Last week, several major cannabis brands were removed from Instagram after the Facebook-owned social network attacked many cannabis and cannabis-relating images, posts and accounts.

The world’s largest outdoor organic medical cannabis competition The Emerald Cup lost their Instagram, Twitter and Gmail accounts all on the same day that they had planned to announce Damian Marley as their headliner for their event in December 2016.

California-based analysis laboratory SC Labs also got shutdown on Instagram last week, losing over 10,000 followers. “On a personal level, now I don’t have access to the five or six years of history documenting our process, our interactions with the community and the story of our company,” an SC Lab employee told Cannabis Club TV. In the past, SC Labs had accumulated over 18,000 followers before being deleted previously. The Emerald Cup had racked up 10,000 followers before their most recent account deletion and 30,000 followers before their last one, according to SF Gate.

“I guess the cannabis science and education was a bit too much for some of our followers we never like to see our social media accounts flagged or removed (4x now) but we also won’t let it stop us,” SC Labs stated, according to SF Gate.

We know that cannabis companies are aggressive and can be very competitive with one another. In a lot of cases, cannabis companies will flag their competitors for removal, just because they can. BuzzFeed stated that social media giants like Facebook and Google specifically target small cannabis businesses that can’t really do anything about it, and they leave the larger corporations alone because they know they will fight back.

Luckily, some companies like CareByDesign and OM Edibles have been successful at being able to restore deleted Instagram accounts after some fighting the system. Facebook has very strong rules and regulations regarding advertising related to cannabis news articles, and will block advertisers and cannabis publications—which is strange, because it’s not the plant or sales of it—political censorship at its basic level in social media land.

Stay tuned for more, as this issue isn’t resolved.