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Where Have All the Snake Emojis on Taylor Swift's Instagram Gone?
Last week, Taylor Swift's Instagram was a snake pit. Now it's not.
By Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.
By now, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian's public feud is legend. It took mere hours to blow up. In less than that time, however, astute Internet sleuths have noticed something awry on Swift's Instagram. Where have all the snakes gone?
The snake emoji started to appear in the comments of Swift's social accounts thanks to the business with her most recent ex, Calvin Harris. After Swift's team made the fact that she wrote the lyrics to "This Is What You Came For," his most recent collaboration with Rihanna, public, he went on a Twitter rant, wondering why his ex and her team were going "so far out of their way to try and make ME look bad at this stage." Fans who sided with Harris—and Katy Perry, who also got involved in the fray—called Swift a snake. They expressed this in the form of the snake emoji, which they left in droves in the comments of Swift's Instagram photos.
It's common behavior these days for a celebrity's fans to latch onto an emoji as supportive shorthand or to spam a perceived threat to their favorite star. Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna's relationship has the clover emoji, for example, and Beyoncé has the bee and the lemon, which each found a home on Jay Z and Rachel Roy's Instagram after Lemonade's release.
So it's not really a surprise that when Kim Kardashian posted Kanye West's recording of the Taylor Swift phone call, effectively calling Swift a liar, her Instagrams were again flooded with snakes. Even Kim Kardashian West, Swift's public enemy number one right now, participated in the emoji deployment—though on Twitter—before the full takedown on Snapchat.
https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/754818471465287680
This brings us back to the new mystery that's afoot. Looking specifically at the July 4 photo with Gigi Hadid and Cara Delevingne, which was once an honest-to-biscuits snake pit just last week, one can now scroll through the comments and not find a single one. A dragon will appear maybe, or occasionally a rat, but not one snake. There are plenty of comments wondering what the snakes mean or pleas to stop commenting on snakes, but there are no actual snakes. (Swifties had even mobilized, asking one another to leave hearts on her pictures in order to overpower the snakes. Guess which emojis now remain?)
Where, exactly, did all the snakes go? Has Instagram itself secretly taken action and started deleting them? It appears so.
A new notification now pops up when a user tries to post a block of emojis—any emojis, that is, good or bad—on a verified user's profile. "This comment has too many special characters," it reads. "Edit your comment before posting. We restrict certain content and actions to protect our community." It also gives you permission to report a problem if you "think we made a mistake." This has to be a recent occurrence since there are blocks of well over 50 heart emojis that remain on the same July 4 'gram. Also, similar blocks could be posted to the comments section on non-verified accounts, but not to verified accounts when we tested. New York Magazine's Select All found that 26 special characters total is the uppermost amount allowed in Swift's comments.
Update (July 19, 4:40 P.M.): An Instagram spokesperson has offered this statement about the phenomenon: "We're always looking for better ways to help people prevent spammy or inappropriate comments on Instagram."
Taylor Swift, Photographed by Mario Testino
Photograph by Mario Testino.
Taylor Swift relaxes at the Beaufort Bar, in the Savoy hotel, on the eve of her concert in London's Hyde Park.