A friend of mine celebrated a birthday a few months ago. For her birthday, her boyfriend bought her Instagram followers for her dog’s account. Based on some new rules coming in hot, lil’ pup may be on the search for some new followers.
First off, yep. You read that right – my friend’s boyfriend bought her dog’s Instagram some followers. What a time to be alive.
Secondly, Instagram seems to be *actually* fed up with the fake followers scheme. I imagine it has something to do with directly tarnishing the organic-ness of the app’s interactions and the direct violation of the app’s terms and conditions.
Insta’s first step in this clean up is to remove people’s accounts who use “inauthentic follows.”
You know the type – the automated apps that people leave that leave super spammy comments to get people to follow them. Or the ones that #followforfollow and then unfollow you a day later. Instagram is apparently sending notices (effectively cease and desists) to users that use the spam bots saying they need to cuts ties from apps or see their Insta experience impacted – loss of features seem to be included in that impact.
A lot of the spam-bots require Insta users to input their password and username into the app (THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS) in order for the bots to do their bidding. I have no clue why on earth anyone would give a stranger a backdoor key to their phone / literally everything on it, but hey, some people like living life in the danger zone.
It is speculated that a big reason for this crackdown is a trickle down from Insta’s dad, Facebook, and their increasing intolerance for foreign misinformation campaigns that have been plaguing the country for a while now. Apparently, Facebook has removed over 750 million inauthentic accounts in the past quarter alone. Woof.
Insta has been working to remove the fake accounts since 2014 but this is the first time we’ve heard it so publicly and candidly discussed, and rumors are that there is no appeals process (we shall see). With the evolution of the app and the learning tools that accompany it, this is a very logical, iron-fisted, and honestly pretty welcomed policy enforcement.
So. If you’re one of the purchasers, or you happen to be following one, brace yourself for impact as those fake followers begin to be removed and stats plummet.
Kiri Isaac is the Web Producer and a Staff Writer at The American Genius and studied communications at Texas A&M. She is fluent in sarcasm and movie quotes and her love language is tacos.
