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If I had to guess, their account creation metrics are flattening out and some product manager had the idea of implementing this restriction to restart growth. If your performance reviews depend on growth, restrictions like this seem rational even if they're obviously anti-user to anyone outside the company.

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With the underlying factor probably being that much fewer people are creating good new content given the global lockdowns.

'Cute women' are a significant part of Instagram content, and if they are indoors wearing a mask there's not much to excite the userbase with.

Also it makes scraping much harder.

All images are still available on the web even delivers everything as JSON. Plenty tools like JDownlaoder can scrap everything in a seconds. they sure have other measurements in place to stop people form doing that large scale.

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