Why is Instagram so full of spam?? By John Yang

 Why is Instagram so full of spam?? By John Yang

I’m always trying to find something interesting to do when I’m bored, and scrolling through Instagram is one of those things that I like to do. After I’ve exhausted the posts of people I follow, and after I’ve seen everyone’s story, I’ll then turn to the explore page. 

And why is that page so full of spam? And why does Instagram allow it?

We’ve all seen it: a short video of something. Usually a “satisfying content” page. Maybe it’s a slime video, or soap cutting or whatever. The caption consists of a series of heart eye emojis or some meaningless interjection: “Wow!” or “Amazing!” or “This is so satisfying!”. Then, it tells you to swipe. Obviously, you’re seeing a slime video right now, so the expectation is that when you swipe to the next slide, you’ll see a similar slime video. But this isn’t the case; the next slide is just an ad for a dumb game. Scroll further down the caption and you’ll see something like this: “DM for credit/removal. No copyright intended”. Scroll further and you’ll see a million hashtags. 

Seriously? This dumb instagram page has the nerve to steal someone else’s content, not give credit to them, and make money off of it? And they try to cover themselves by adding the “DM for credit” phrase. No, this isn’t fair use. You are stealing from the real creators and stealing their views for your page to get more followers. And you make money off of these ads. 

You see this over and over and over again. Isn’t Instagram aware of this? Why don’t they do anything about it? 

There’s a problem with the Instagram algorithm. By spamming hashtags, the post becomes more visible to more people, who will then interact with the post by liking it or commenting on it. This becomes a vicious cycle in which these posts and pages get tens of thousands of likes, which then boosts their metrics, so Instagram will show the post to even more people. 

What can we do about it? Unfortunately, not much. You can click on the menu for that post and ask Instagram to show less of it to you if you don’t want to see it. Try not to like or comment on posts like those. But these content farms and spam pages will continue to steal content and profit from it, and we can’t do much about it.