I’m so sorry to break this to all my influencer friends (that I don’t have), but Instagram has decided to start hiding images that it decided have been photoshopped.
The move isn’t actually to stop influencers doing anything dodgy this time, although there are a heap of new rules Instagram has had to enforce to because of that. They keep getting around those rules, but that’s a whole other story.
No, this rule has been put in place as a way to tackle the always present fake news. The idea is that a filter will pick up on images it suspects are photoshopped and stick a nice, big, black ‘False Information’ banner over it. You can then choose to click to reveal, like we already do with sensitive content.
On top of that, any photo marked down as false information will be taken out of Explore and won’t come up under any searched hashtags, as well as being flagged in any future posts.
Suss out another social media fail, with the GOAAT Team chatting about Lady GaGa tweeting that she’d forgotten ARTPOP…
Instagram has said that the pictures are marked suspicious using “a combination of feedback from our community and technology,” which is vague, but so are a lot of social media rules to be fair.
There is an unforeseen downside to this new rule. Digital artists use a lot of photoshop, and getting their art out there on platforms like Instagram is important for them. This rule has already picked up a couple of digital artworks, including one of a guy standing on mountains that had been photoshopped into rainbow colours.
It’s obviously impossible to track each and every post on the internet, and trying to abolish fake news is a noble pursuit. Instagram’s attempt to hide and photoshopped images is a good start, but might not necessarily be great for digital artists. It’s definitely not great for influencers though, so I’m not entirely against it.
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