Facebook-owned photo sharing platform Instagram has announced the latest step to purge inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that used third-party apps to boost their popularity.
The company said that it has built a Machine Learning (ML) tool to help spot accounts that used automated apps to generate likes and follows from fake users to produce a fake impression that they were enjoying more attention than they actually did.
"This type of behaviour is bad for the community and violates our community guidelines and terms of use," Instagram said via this statement.
Instagram advised its users not to use third-party apps to access their accounts by sharing their username and password, warning that such behaviour may have their login information hacked or exposed and their accounts being exploited to send spam.
"These new measures will be ongoing, and accounts that continue to use third-party apps to grow their audience may see their Instagram experience impacted," the company said.
Instagram has long been fighting unauthentic activity on its platform by taking out fake accounts, but it has not taken similar action against false likes before.
The company's updated step to enforce policy followed its parent company Facebook's recent campaign against misinformation and foreign attempts to exert political influence among its users.
Social media influencing has been grown concern and the only surprising bit about this decision is, Instagram didn’t see this coming much earlier. With a heavy influence of what we saw on the web, having a personality/brand promote it vigorously tends to serve up the product as the one to go for.
This could also be Instagram’s way of saying to a brand that if you really want to sell a product then advertise with us and you’ll get better results for every buck spent.
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