According to The Verge, after a group of employees complained that pro-Palestinian content could not be seen by users during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Facebook-owned Instagram modified its algorithm. The company confirmed to The Verge on Sunday that Instagram usually displays original content in its stories before reposting content, but will now begin to give equal weight to both.
As reported by BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times, Instagram employees have repeatedly filed complaints about content that was automatically reviewed by Instagram, for example, posts about al-Asqa mosques were mistakenly deleted. According to a report in the Financial Times, these employees did not believe that the review was deliberate, but one of them said that “a large-scale review is biased against any marginalized group.”
Yesterday we experienced a technical bug, which impacted millions of people’s stories, highlights and archives around the world. For people impacted by this bug, they saw their stories that were re-sharing posts disappear and their archive and highlights stories were missing. https://t.co/E2WTcTN7Jt
— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) May 7, 2021
A Facebook spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the change was not only in response to concerns about pro-Palestinian content, but the company realized that the way the app works led people to think it was suppressing certain views or topic. “We want to make it very clear that this is not the case,” the spokesperson said. “This applies to any post that is reposted in the story, no matter what it is about.”
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In the past few weeks, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have been criticized for their presentation or non-presentation around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Earlier this month, Twitter restricted the account of a Palestinian writer, which it later said was “wrong”. On May 6, many accounts were unable to publish content related to Palestine within a few hours. Instagram director Adam Mosseri tweeted that the move was due to a “technical error” and Instagram finally apologized.
Instagram stated that it has repeatedly heard users say that they are more interested in original stories from close friends, rather than seeing people who repost other people’s photos and posts. A spokesperson for the company said this is why it prioritizes original stories. The spokesperson said: “However, not only now, but in the past, more and more people are reposting posts. We see that the impact on these posts is greater than expected. The stories of reposted posts did not get the coverage that people expected. This is not a good experience.”
The spokesperson added that Instagram still believes that users want to see more original stories, so it is studying how to use new tools to focus stories on original content.
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