Incellectuals

Submission 6,136

Part of a series on Shitposting. [View Related Entries]

About

Incellectuals refers to a multi-admin, shitposting meme page on Instagram that has gone through many iterations due to repeated account suspensions. The first Incellectuals page was called @incellectuals and was created sometime in 2019, also named on as a portmanteau of "incel" and "intellectuals." This first account gained its largest following during 2019 and 2020. As of August 2021, the account is in its fifth iteration called @incellectuals8.

History

The first Incellectuals page was created sometime in 2019 and was called @incellectuals. Incellectuals, in general, helped popularize shitposting Instagram pages with multiple admins. This way of running a meme page enables the page to be posting consistently at all hours. This helped the page grow an enigmatic reputation.

On May 30th, 2020, Incellectuals was deleted by Instagram for unknown reasons.^[1] The page was quickly rebooted into a new version (@incellectuals2) the next day. The account was suspended again later that year in September 2020 but brought back in October 2020.^[2]

On December 17th, 2020, @incellectuals2 was suspended again because, according to a tweet from them (shown below, left), they posted an explicit video.^[3] This suspension happened two days after Elon Musk reposted one of the account's memes to Twitter without giving them credit (shown below, right).^[4]

On February 9th, 2021, @incellectuals2 was resurrected on Instagram.^[5] The account stayed up and posted consistently until March 10th, 2021, when it was suspended again for posting, according to their Twitter (shown below), too many Alex Jones videos.^[6] They brought it back in April but were banned more times throughout the coming months.

In June 2021, @incellectuals2 was discontinued on Instagram due to too many account suspensions. On June 15th, 2021, the Incellectuals admins created a new page to hold their content, dubbed @incellectuals5.^[7] The admins decided to skip 3 and 4 due to other people already claiming those handles, probably knowing the volatile nature of the account and wanting to grab the usernames before the Incellectuals admins could.^[8]

@incellectuals5 Deletion

@incellectuals5 was zucced on August, 18th, 2021, and had roughly 13,600 followers and 3,300 posts at the time of deletion. Their new handle is @incellectuals36.^[9] The first, official post on the new account is a screenshot of their previous account before deletion (shown below).

Fake Accounts and Copies

Because of the first account suspension in May 2020, there were many fake @incellectuals accounts that began to surface around the same time. A lot of them were created to try and steal followers from the newly formed @incellectuals2. Many of them, however, were just spinoffs of the account, all of them using the same "I ❤️ Jokes" profile picture or variations of it. A phenomenon then grew in 2020 out of these mock-incellectuals pages, which each had varying themes. Some of them gained followings of their own.^[10]

A strange phenomenon with the Instagram algorithm that sometimes happened for Instagrammers who followed multiple incellectuals-type pages, the algorithm occasionally recommended more "X_incellectuals" pages to them in a seemingly broken loophole (shown below). This raised questions about the Instagram algorithm, where in this instance, because of the similar profile pictures, bios and content of the "incellectuals" pages, Instagram recognized them as their own sub-genre to recommend.