As the line between social media platforms and news outlets slowly begins to blur, the risk of misinformation becomes more and more real. It's far too easy to put something up on the internet, and not enough netizens fact-check as they read.
Instagram isn't the first place that most people go to for their news, but it's not unheard of either. This might be a scarier predicament that it sounds, according to new research.
Is Instagram's Algorithm Promoting Misinformation?
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has published a report to its website entitled "Malgorithm," which details its newest research findings: that Instagram's algorithm is recommending COVID-19 and anti-vaccination misinformation to its millions of users.
Using test accounts, the CCDH discovered that Instagram's Explore page and Suggested Post feature encourage users to view posts that feature false information. What's more, if you interact with these posts (like or comment on them), you'll be nudged towards other extremist content.
CEO Imran Ahmed writes in the introduction of the report:
Users are being encouraged to view radical material, and then, once hooked, cross-fertilized with content from other limbs of the radical worldview. If a user follows anti-vaxxers, they are fed QAnon conspiracism and antisemitic hate; if they engage with conspiracies, they are fed electoral and anti-vaxx misinformation.
The researchers created 15 new Instagram profiles to follow a range of accounts, from health authorities to anti-vaxxers, and recorded the recommendations they got every week from September 14 to November 16 of 2020.
104 posts that feature misinformation were recorded, and the breakdown of their topics are as follows:
- COVID-19/Coronavirus – 57.7%
- Vaccines – 21.2%
- US Election – 12.5%
- QAnon – 8.7%
The only profiles that weren’t recommended misleading posts were the ones that exclusively followed recognized health authorities.
Instagram seems to be the only major social media site/app left that hasn't made any big moves to crack down on misinformation. The platform did temporarily remove the Recent page before the 2020 US election, but hasn't done much else.
In August 2020, Facebook started to remove posts with COVID-19 misinformation. Twitter launched community-powered moderation via Birdwatch in January, and TikTok removed thousands of videos featuring election misinformation last month.
It's about time Instagram did something similar, lest the platform be riddled with fake news.
Facebook's Response to the CCDH Report
Since Facebook acquired Instagram in 2021, the CCDH published an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to fix Instagram's “broken algorithm." Zuckerberg did not reply personally, but a Facebook spokesperson sure did.
Unfortunately, it probably isn't the response the CCDH was hoping for. The spokesperson said the research was five months out of date and based on “an extremely small sample size." That probably means that Instagram doesn't have any plans to change its seemingly concerning algorithm.
