We all know that most social media companies aren’t exactly pro-Second Amendment. They used to have a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward guns, but then all that changed.

While I disagree with it, I can at least get why some of the decisions are made. If someone builds a gun from a YouTube tutorial, then kills someone, they don’t want it blowing back on them, for example.

Recently, Instagram made a decision, though, that makes even less sense than normal.

My first hint was when Paula Bolyard, the managing editor at our sister site PJ Media, tweeted this:

So Instagram shadow-banned the @DemolitionRanch guy for posting this pic of a cat surrounded by guns. The stupid never ends with these social media companies. pic.twitter.com/JionhZLwdN

— Paula Bolyard (@pbolyard) August 1, 2023

Wait…really?

Now, I know Paula from having written at PJ Media myself for a number of years, and I trust her to be accurate, but I had to look for more. There’s no way this could be right, right?

Except, it is.

Got in trouble on IG for posting this. Gonna be posting more on X now. Tired of being censored for things that are legal pic.twitter.com/60v7z1NBkV

— DrMattCarriker (@DemolitionRanch) August 1, 2023

Now, let’s note that this is just a picture of a kitten with firearms elsewhere in the picture. There’s nothing even hinting at harming the cat. There’s nothing suggesting the kitty is in danger, in distress, or anything.

It’s not like Instagram doesn’t have a ton of gun pics on it already, and most of those accounts didn’t get a notification like this one.

Honestly, this is about as insane as we’re going to find.

I mean, it’s a cat picture. I’m old enough to remember when cat photos were a staple of the internet. This is the kind of content I wish we had more of, to be honest, and Instagram thinks I shouldn’t be able to see it.

Frankly, it pisses me off even more because we had to take our oldest to the vet for the last time on Monday, and pictures like this kind of help soothe that hole in the heart.

But Instagram knows better. They know what people need and it’s not cute pictures of kittens and guns.

Reaching out to Instagram–which is owned by Meta–is pointless. I tried to get a comment from them, but as per usual, no reply.

This is a shame because I’d genuinely like to know how this picture somehow violates the terms of service or anything else. Remember, this is Instagram, where an underage girl can post booty pics for slavering perverts and that’s perfectly acceptable, but a picture of a kitten? Well, we can’t have that, now can we?

Look, Instagram is a private entity. They can allow or disallow whatever pictures they want on it. They’re not required by law to allow the cute kitten picture if they don’t want to.

And Demolition Ranch isn’t raising a stink, really. They’re just not going to be on Instagram as much, which I don’t blame them for. They’re moving to X, formerly Twitter, where they can post things like kitten pictures in peace.

It’s just rather sad that we’re in a world where the inclusion of a firearm in a photo of a cute baby cat somehow warrants an account getting restricted. We know it’s not because of the cat, so it had to be the inclusion of the firearms, which shouldn’t be a thing.

Social media companies aren’t just trying to cover their butts anymore with guns. They’re trying their damnedest to do something very different.