Every business requires some form of investment and enough customers to whom its output can be sold on a consistent basis in order to make a profit.
Instagram is currently testing a new feature that would hide “Like” counts on your page. Rumors have spread around for a while since a tester leaked screenshots of the news update, but it was officially announced at the Facebook F8 Developers Conference and will be rolled out in Canada as early as next week.
A few weeks ago, screenshots were acquired by Jane Manchun Wong, who uncovered the app was currently testing a prototype of the feature.
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“We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get,” Instagram says in one of the screenshots from Wong. “During this test, only the person who shares a post will see the total number of likes it gets.”
With the test, Instagram plans to remove the total number of likes from photos and videos on that show up on the main feed, profiles and permalink pages. Only the account user will be able to see the number of likes a post receives. It will show a couple profile photos next to a call out of a few names who have liked the photo, as it does now, but will no longer show the exact count of people who liked the post.
Instagram says the reason for this update test is to have users concentrate on their posts and interacting with the app rather than likes. Many users will delete photos that do not get “enough” likes. Many studies have been conducted on the culture surrounding social media and the unhealthy obsession with “likes” and comparison to others online. A recent report from UK’s Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) and the Young Health Movement looked at the impact of different social media platforms on mental health. While there were some positives about accessing health information, the opportunity for self-expression and a feeling of community, the negative factors were heavy. Things like anxiety, depression, loneliness, sleep quality and negative impact on body image were all reported.
The hope is by getting rid of the liking part of the app it could reduce some of these negative effects about getting enough likes on a post and eliminate the competition to have the most “likable post.” This could increase authenticity across posting and could be a benefit for many.
While a benefit for many, some influencers have expressed concern about their feed rankings in the algorithm and their source of income. There are currently no plans to hide follower counts on profiles, which are the main source for sponsorships for influencers. Developers will most likely need to update the algorithm to reflect the inability to publically see likes and find a new way to curate content feeds based on the popularity of a post, such as engagement through comments.
There are other updates that were found in Wong’s test such as chat thread stickers for Direct messages, augmented reality filters for Direct Video calls, simultaneous co-watching of recommended videos through Direct, karaoke-style lyrics that appear synced to soundtracks in Stories, emoji reactions to feed posts and a shopping bag for commerce.
While it is starting in Canada, it is not certain if they will begin to test in other places. Like many tests, they will have to see an increase in positive interactions and user engagement to expand. If it is successful on Instagram, it could spread to other platforms like Facebook in the hope to create a healthier social media environment for all.
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Nicole Martin is the owner of NR Digital Consulting and host of Talk Digital To Me Podcast. She has worked in many different industries on customer journeys, website management, social media, and content strategy. Starting out as a journalist, Nicole has a BA in Print Journalism from Penn State University and an MA in Journalism & Mass Communication from Point Park University. After working with multiple publications, she saw the industry rapidly changing to digital and decided to change career directions to focus on digital marketing in the new market. She taught English 420: Writing for the Web at Penn State University as an Adjunct Professor and is also an avid public speaker and presenter. Nicole recently did a TEDx Talk on Personalization and the Privacy Paradox and currently works as the Digital Marketing Manager at Sonic Healthcare USA in Austin, Texas. She is now using her knowledge in the field combined with her writing background to share information about technology, digital marketing, data, and innovation.
Source: Instagram May Be Getting Rid of ‘Likes’ On Platform
According to a Business Insider investigation, Instagram has been allowing a San Francisco-based marketing agency, HYP3R, to flout its rules and collect information from millions of users. That includes physical locations, stories, photos, and bios, which were used to create a database of user profiles. In fact, according to HYP3R itself, the marketing firm scrapes as many as one million posts a month.
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has largely avoided many of the privacy scandals and scrutiny that have plagued its parent company. This revelation, however, puts that scrutiny in an entirely new light as the company seems to do little to actually enforce privacy protections designed to prevent the sort of behavior.
In Instagram’s defense, it took swift action once it was presented with Business Insider’s reporting, issuing a statement that it had banned HYP3R from its platform, and making a change that would prevent other companies from taking advantage of its API in the same way.
“HYP3R’s actions were not sanctioned and violate our policies. As a result, we’ve removed them from our platform. We’ve also made a product change that should help prevent other companies from scraping public location pages in this way,” the company told Business Insider through a spokesperson.
HYP3R is a “Facebook Marketing Partner,” meaning this isn’t some rogue firm acting outside the lines. It’s one of Instagram’s preferred partners, and though there are policies against this type of behavior, there were apparently no actual limitations on the access the marketing firm had to your private data via the API it created.
In a response to my request for comment, an Instagram spokesperson provided me with the same statement as above and stressed to me that the data scraped by HYP3R was publicly available and that HYP3R wasn’t able to access private user account information.
Despite Instagram’s response, it’s more than a little concerning that there weren’t actual technical protections that would have prevented this kind of activity. And, of course, there’s the fact that this is just one more in a long list of episodes involving a Facebook-owned app and “privacy problem” in the same headline.
In no uncertain terms, we are at the point where Facebook needs an all-hand-on-deck response to what can only be described as a five-alarm fire. Any amount of trust that Facebook still had with its users is burning to the ground. Sure, the company is still profitable, but that’s the problem.
These practices and lack of care with users’ information largely feed that profit engine, leaving the company little incentive to do anything different. Facebook, as a platform, is fundamentally unable to protect its users’ information– because it literally exists to exploit that information.
You could argue that it’s impossible to fully police the activity of the countless number of advertising and marketing partners the company has on its platforms. That may be true, but if it is, then it’s time to shut the whole thing down. Seriously.
Where else is would we say it’s okay to gather a bunch of hens into a hen house, promising them a safe place to hang out, and then invite a bunch of foxes over to come and play? There’s no scenario where that ends well for the hens.
Friends, we are the hens. And while we’ve known for a while that there was something wrong, it turns out it’s a much bigger problem than we thought.
All of this is a reminder, though I’ve written it many times, that trust is your brand’s most valuable asset. What you do to guard that trust, or betray it, makes all the difference in whether or not you get the benefit of the doubt when bad news comes.
And, as a final thought, regardless of the impact on your company’s brand, there’s also a more global principle of “do the right thing.” Do the right thing for your customers, even when it isn’t the most convenient thing for you. Protect their privacy, even when it means sacrificing some easy profits.
Do the hard work of thinking through the implications of your business practices and policies so that you don’t find yourself in a situation where those practices end up in a headline about just another scandal or major problem.
It turns out that “do the right thing,” usually leads to trust anyway.
Source: Instagram Allowed an Ad Partner to Track Millions of Users’ Data, and It’s a Major Privacy Problem
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Every day, 400 million people open up Instagram and flip through Stories, the app’s short, ephemeral photo and video updates from people they follow. Since its launch in 2016, Stories has become a popular way for people to share more about their lives–and more often. But with that immediacy has come a pressure to seem cool and spontaneous all the time. It’s also a challenge for brands that use Stories to advertise; companies need to produce fun, current content on a daily basis, and manage those Stories the same way they manage their permanent content elsewhere online–even if it quickly disappears…….
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No app is more integral to teens’ social lives than Instagram. While Millennials relied on Facebook to navigate high school and college, connect with friends, and express themselves online, Gen Z’s networks exist almost entirely on Instagram. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of teens use the platform, which now has more than 1 billion monthly users. Instagram allows teens to chat with people they know, meet new people, stay in touch with friends from camp or sports, and bond by sharing photos or having discussions.
Facebook’s Instagram site is overrun with pornography and other sexually charged images and videos that are accessible to the site’s many teenaged users. This is strange given the site’s strict nudity rules, which Instagram has been mocked for in the past. According to the site’s Community Guidelines, even “artistic” nudity is forbidden: This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks includes some photos of female nipples, but photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding are allowed. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK………
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