People will always find a way around these rules. Any free social network is going to inevitably end up with groups using it for nefarious reasons. Banning hashtags seems like it’s attempting to attack a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself, too.

Presumably they are doing this because of pressure from advertisers. I’m not sure why they care so much. I can somewhat understand why they care about YouTube, where their money (indirectly) goes to the creator making the content they disagree with, but on Instagram that isn’t the case.