In a video posted from another social network, in this case Twitter, Adam Mosseri, the boss of Instagram, announced on April 20 the upcoming implementation of a batch of new features. These changes will mainly concern the ranking algorithm with the aim of bringing up original content that may appeal to users, to the detriment of those that are simply shared or republished, and therefore already seen many times.
? New Features ?
We’ve added new ways to tag and improved ranking:
– Product Tags
– Enhanced Tags
– Ranking for originalityCreators are so important to the future of Instagram, and we want to make sure that they are successful and get all the credit they deserve. pic.twitter.com/PP7Qa10oJr
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
Reduce the reach of unoriginal posts on Instagram
As Adam Mosseri clarifies in another tweet, in response to a question, “ as we move towards recommendations, it becomes increasingly important not to overvalue aggregators, as that would be bad for creators, and therefore bad for Instagram in the long run “.
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As we lean more into recommendations it’s becoming increasingly important that don’t overvalue aggregators, as that would be bad for creators, and therefor bad for Instagram long term.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
To help original content creators increase the reach of their posts, Instagram intends to reduce the dominance of accounts that repost previously posted content or share posts from other accounts. Thus, if an account publishes a lot of so-called “non-original” content, the user will face a drop in the reach of his publications.
Adam Mosseri specifies that if ” a user creates something from scratch or their imagination, they should get more credit than if an account re-shares something they found on someone else’s “.
Modification of the content prioritization algorithm to differentiate between different posts
Of course, this announcement provoked many reactions and many questions. One challenges Adam Mosseri on how Instagram’s algorithm will identify the original creator of a post that has subsequently been re-shared.
We can’t know for sure. We build classifiers to predict how *likely* something is to be original, but that’s not knowing. We look at things like who’s in the video, and if we’ve seen the video before.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022
To this, the boss of Instagram replies that he cannot be sure, but that his objective is to build a real classifier to predict the probability of the originality of content. The algorithm should take into account all the elements present in an image or in a video and compare it with the publications already present on Instagram.
Instagram should also rely on the fact that the account is not its first time sharing non-original content. If so, the user will be more suspicious than usual. The social network, which has passed the milestone of 2 billion users, nevertheless knows that identifying the origin of content remains complex and has announced that it will continue to refine its algorithm again and again until it is not fully effective.
Last December, Adam Mosseri spoke before the US Senate, trying to argue about the usefulness of his platform for young people when they ” are going through difficult times “.