Instagram moderation is broken
On Tuesday, I loaded Instagram and learned Meta had disabled my account. The alleged reason was that I was under 13, the minimum age for joining the site. It gave me 30 days to appeal before the account was permanently disabled, asking me to upload a copy of my state ID. I decided to trust Meta’s promise it would be “stored securely and deleted within 30 days.” But after review, Meta insisted I was still underage.
I’ve had a similar experience with Instagram lately. My account, roughly a month old, has been deactivated three times. Whenever I appeal, which requires me to upload a selfie to verify... something, the account gets reinstated within minutes. The reason for it all? Meta says that my account is related to a seperate account that’s on their shit list.
Instagram tackling abuse while Twitter sits on the sidelines
Jacob Kastrenakes for The Verge:
Online harassment is a serious issue that any network needs to deal with, period. And flexible tools like a custom banned word list can let individual users take matters into their own hands to clear up their comments section, should someone begin posting hateful or otherwise offensive or tasteless remarks.
In my experience as a single white male, the harassment on Instagram is far less frequent than on other social networks. That said, it’s a smart move by the company to get these sorts of things in place before issues get completely out of control.
Instagram testing redesign on iOS
Instagram, following the controversial announcement that it would change the order in which images appear in user feeds, now appears to be testing a complete redesign of its app.
I really like the direction they’re (potentially) going with this. Flushing the colour out of the app UI and really letting the pictures come to life and take centre stage. I haven’t always been the biggest fan of Instagram but it’s thoughtful, smart updates like this, rather than a couple new filters every few months, that would make me actually start using it again on a regular basis.
Who knows, maybe we’ll finally get a new iOS icon out of this too.