The Instagram account belonging to the UK Cannabis Social Club was deleted after being active for nearly 10 years. Parent company Meta which has a strong anti-cannabis policy declined to respond to our communications and requests to have the page returned.
As a consequence of losing the page, we’ve had to restart it. It’s the same name, @ukcannabissocialclubs, but we’ve lost all of our followers, so anyone who was following us previously will need to re-follow to start seeing our posts again.
We believe the algorithm picked up the word “cannabis” too many times, along with flagged hashtags relating to cannabis also used by online dealers. We even had a few use our logo and images but link to a telegram or website unrelated to us. It could just be that we had lots and lots of images of cannabis. The deletion came shortly after we posted a harm reduction blog making sure people thought twice about sharing joints during the pandemic. It could have been anything. But what’s done is done, and we can only rebuild.
And by the looks of it, Instagram has already flagged us up and restricted our content. That means they won’t promote it to a UK audience. All the more reason for cannabis policy and CSC supporters to engage with our content.
Comeback Kush
It’s a bit of a blow when you have one of your social outreach platforms taken away from you. Censorship sucks. We’ve found that every social network, forum, and our website has different demographics following, so it was like losing a part of our voice and a substantial part of our reach.
Thankfully for us, we weren’t completely dependent on a third-party platform because we have had this website, membership, and email newsletters to keep in communication with our followers and those interested in UK cannabis policy reform.
Since restarting the page, we’ve already gained back over 2,000 followers. If you’re one of them, thank you! If you were following us before but haven’t seen it, we disappeared. For those who never followed us in the first place but use Instagram, come and join the conversation! We have an active community that contributes to the comments, and we read every single one. The UKCSC really values hearing about your experiences and thoughts about what’s going on.
Follow follow follow…
Other ways you can help include:
- Sharing one of our posts on your stories. If you do this, don’t forget to us in it so we can reshare it in our stories too.
- Leave a comment on our posts, it helps more people see us and improves our rating on the algorithm as a relevant piece of content.
- Send our posts to your mates that sell, grow, and consume cannabis and anyone who is pro decriminalisation and legalisation.
Our other socials