The days of fake news on Instagram is coming to an end as the company launched a new push feature to eliminate inauthentic followers and likes gained via the use of third-party tools that makes accounts appear more popular than they actually are.
Instagram that, “Every day, people come to Instagram to have real experiences, including genuine interactions. It’s our responsibility to ensure these experiences aren’t disrupted by inauthentic activity…We will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity.”
This was coming amid growing concerns about Facebook’s efforts to curb misinformation and manipulation.
The company further said, “We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts which use these services, and remove the inauthentic activity. Accounts we identify using these services will receive an in-app message alerting them that we have removed the inauthentic likes, follows and comments. We will also ask them to secure their account by changing their password.”
They also noted that many of these apps also use people’s accounts to further fuel activity – like liking and following other accounts on their behalf. Those actions will also be reversed, eliminating their effectiveness.
Twitter, earlier in the year has also made efforts to remove inauthentic accounts, resulting in a decline in the number of followers for some users.
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