Kansas has been temporarily erased from existence — at least as far as photo-sharing service Instagram is concerned.
If you tried to search #Kansas on Instagram Thursday morning, you would have found the state hashtag reduced to about 30 top posts and a notice that "recent posts from #Kansas are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram's community guidelines."
What does this mean?
Instagram is no longer displaying new #Kansa content because someone (or possibly more than one person) has been filling the tag with inappropriate, inflammatory or otherwise not-safe-for-work pictures.
According to The Data Pack, Instagram currently censors dozens of hashtags in the name of maintaining a clean online community.
Some of them make sense — there's probably not anything fit for public consumption filed under #takeitoff or #feetofatlanta, and #proanorexia or #probulimia tags can create communities that encourage unhealthy behavior.
Others, like #Kansas, #publicrelations and #killingit, appear to be inoffensive categories that have temporarily fallen victim to salacious or abusive spammers.
(Or maybe someone at Instagram headquarters is a big Missouri Tigers fan. You never know.)
The same thing happened to a popular Philadelphia hashtag, #Philly, in late 2015, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Today, we're again able to search that tag for all of the rich cheese steak- and Eagles-related content it has to offer, so hopefully Kansas will be cleared out soon.
Just keep your #feetofAtlanta content where it belongs, okay?
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