Instagram wants to give battle to those who buy followers and likes, starting to do a good account cleanup. Here's what will happen in the coming days
Instagram begins to take measures against the phenomenon of bots and fake followers that much has been discussed in recent months. It turns out, in fact, that some well-known influencers from millions and millions of followers, in fact, quite a few of those followers if they had bought them in bulk.
The social of images has announced that a clampdown against "inauthentic activities" is coming. That is, not only fake followers, but also little hearts from cold bots programmed to increase the "engagement" on the profiles of those who are willing to spend to succeed on Instagram. "Starting today," reads an Instagram note, "we're going to start removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity. We've created machine learning tools that help us identify accounts that use these services and remove these inauthentic activities."
How the removal of fake Instagram accounts works
Instagram will send a message to these users (uncovered via artificial intelligence algorithms) who have granted access to apps that bring fake followers via bots: this message will warn them that access has been automatically removed and that they should change their password for security. Finally, Instagram will take ads away from these follower-buying services. "Even advertisements are subject to our guidelines that prohibit spam activities such as collecting likes, followers etc etc - explains an Instagram spokesperson to TechCrunch - so even advertising these services violates our policies."
Services to buy fake followers
Services to buy fake followers on Instagram there are thousands of them. Until a year ago, the most famous was Instragress, which then closed its doors. Many of these services are based in Eastern Europe or the Far East, where they reside thousands of servers kept on for one reason only: to send to the profiles of those who pay a robust, but fake, amount of likes, comments and new followers. This is no small problem, even for Instagram: the social is now a powerful advertising platform where many brands spend directly or indirectly. Directly through advertisements, indirectly through "product placement": they put their products in the hands of the most famous influencers, asking for a number of photos complete with hashtags. But if the influencers have tens or hundreds of thousands of fake followers, even advertising is less effective and brands run away. So, if Instagram doesn't intervene as soon as possible to solve the problem of fake followers, the whole "influencer economy" risks collapsing like a house of cards. And, with it, the revenues of influencers and Instagram itself.