Why So Many Instagram Users are Complaining About the Algorithm…and Why You Should Care Too
Instagram, on the surface, seems like it should be a dream platform for artists and activists alike — a captive audience, inbuilt sociability, and a clear focus on visual artistic expression. Then how come so many artists and activists are unhappy with the platform? The answer comes down to corporate greed.
Those of us who regularly use Instagram, whether for personal or professional reasons, will no doubt have seen a few infographics floating around that mention the Instagram ‘algorithm’. These nifty little posts generally consist of a few pictorials labelling each of the app’s engagement buttons — like, comment, share and save — and the value of each one in ‘cheating the Instagram algorithm’. Many of us may also have seen influencers with small to medium sized followings explicitly ask for people to share and comment on their most recent posts. For the casual Instagram user, these posts may be seem trite, and even shallow — surely, a symbol of the extent to which our collective social relevance is intrinsically tied to clicks, likes and heart eye emojis. But for influencers and artists alike, this is far more serious. It is an attempt to forge a career through an app that provides both the largest possible captive audience, and yet seems to be make ever more infuriating decisions that leave its platform inaccessible to artists just breaking into the industry.
Of course, it is not just artists who are affected. Instagram, particularly this year, has become a melting pot of social activism and communal education. Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests of Spring this year, educational resources and discussions surrounding critical race theory travelled across the platform at warp speed, and the social justice torch was kept aflame by the mass spreading of petitions and political commentary concerning everything from the UK Government’s decision to not make amendments to the Gender Equalities Act, to the structural inequalities present in Jordan that were unveiled by the explosion in Beirut. We can no longer argue that Instagram is a simply a platform for pictures of sunsets and friend’s holidays. It has become a expansive, if at times fractured, global community, that allows for the rapid and meticulous sharing of news, political thought and activism. And this new found sense of global community should, one would assume, be to the great benefit of artists — no longer confined to finding footholds in the industry within their home towns, able to bypass the rigamarole of finding venues, funding or enticing an audience.
However, things have not been so simple. And surprisingly (or not, as I will explain) the party standing in the way of all this opportunity is Instagram itself. In particular, people are getting increasingly frustrated by its algorithm. ‘The Instagram Algorithm’ refers to the complex inner process by which the Instagram app decides which posts to ‘push’, either by showing it on follower’s timelines, or by pushing it to the top of certain hashtags. The algorithm is a mysterious, inconsistent beast, and unsurprisingly Instagram has been extremely cagey about explaining how its algorithm works. Therefore, it has been left to the platform’s users to work out how best to create ‘engagement’ with what they post. Long gone are the days of posts showing up in chronological order — now, most users theorise that post performance is driven by engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves, each one apparently more useful than the last), but also such extraneous factors such as time of day, day of the week, follower count, use of filters and other, more personal factors that I shall return to later. This clearly creates something of a vicious circle — a posts performance is based on engagement, but with so many extraneous factors influencing engagement, the number of people seeing a post in the first place is immediately jeopardised if, say, you are busy at the arbitrary hour in the day when posts do much better. Many users lament Instagram’s decision to swap out the old chronological algorithm, for this almost Kafkaesque system of incomprehensible requirements. What drove Instagram to make this switch? Obviously, it was money.
At the time of writing, users on the app are airing their frustrations with how Instagram’s shopping feature has been given a new pride of place, taking the place of where the notification button used to be. Users have rightly criticized this as another move from Instagram away from a platform that is genuinely accessible and useful to its user base, and towards becoming an out and out money spinning exercise. However, the rejigging of the shop button is not an isolated incident. Most internet users accept that websites make their money through ad revenue — it’s essentially a given, considering that these platforms are free at the point of entry. Facebook acquiring the photo sharing site in 2012, and in the process taking out their primary competition, could be seen as the beginning of a slow decline. But it was in 2018 that things took a turn for the worse. This was when Instagram changed their algorithm, to what was mentioned above, but this was not the only changes users noticed. Around the same time, Instagram added the option to pay for a sponsored post — which essentially boosts a post, sending it onto more peoples feeds. This, in line with the algorithm changes, caused a predictable shift — now that sponsored posts (mostly used by brands and corporations) were being boosted onto more timelines, their engagement was being dramatically increased, further pushing them over other posts. This caused a closed circuit that meant that Instagram was no longer an equal opportunities platform. Growth came with a monetary fee attached that has become an almost crucial sacrifice. And that is not the only changes Instagram has made. In an effort to squeeze more money out of ad revenue, the platform has added a litany of features that have run rampantly out of control, all with the intention of keeping users on the app for longer periods of time. They have pilfered ideas from other social media brands — stories from Snapchat, or more recently reels inspired by Tik Tok — and, more infuriatingly, have added a suggested posts feature to main feeds, meaning that users are able to find the pages they actually follow less and less. With each new addition, Instagram seems to make their platform harder and harder to use. And yet the numbers speak for themselves — in 2015, Instagram was estimate to pull in about $500 million for its developers. As of 2020, that number is estimated to between 5 and 10 billion.
Now, even after all of this, many people will be thinking “So what? It’s Instagram. You aren’t entitled to engagement.” For the casual Instagram user, this is certainly true. But for artists and activists, who rely on an audience to make their living, it is a sharp pain in the neck. And, at a time when we are all locked inside our homes away from the outside world (at the time of writing, we are in another lockdown in the UK), the finicky nature of the algorithm has become yet another hurdle in an obstacle course that shows no signs of ever ending. In lockdown, performers have been shut out of the venues where they made their living. Activist groups have been unable to fully collaborate, or get out into the communities which are fundamental to their work. And users across the platform have seen a devastating loss of income for a variety of reasons — either they were self-employed, forced to live on a furlough pay for a minimum wage job, or were perhaps made redundant altogether. For many artists, activists and creatives at the moment, a social media presence is the only means of keeping yourself afloat. And when these platforms are arranged in such a way that prioritises financial gain over fostering community and highlighting the voices of its userbase, it makes the challenge that much harder. And yet, in a cruel twist, given our current predicament, these users do not have the luxury of finding alternative platforms. Social media is all they currently have. So they must keep fighting against a system that is unjustly stacked against them.
But the complexities of the algorithm is just one factor making Instagram an unwelcoming platform for content creators. For those who specifically follow queer, fat or content creators of colour, the phrase ‘shadow ban’ is another that is known to plague the online Instagram community. Shadow banning is the event of a user being effectively ‘soft-banned’ by having their content not show up in people’s feeds or hashtags at all. If the algorithm could be described as unfathomable, then the process of shadow banning is positively mythical — Instagram has never, and presumably would never, confirmed that is exists, (except for a sort of half admission, pictured opposite) and as such evidence of its occurrence is purely anecdotal and speculative. But given the large number of creators who say they have experienced it, it is quite clear that there is certainly something going on. And what’s more, it’s impossible to ignore the kinds of accounts — and more specifically, what sorts of bodies — that are most heavily hit by the spectre of shadow banning. Instagram’s prejudice against certain kinds of bodies is well documented, and the platform is ever so slowly beginning to admit to its inbuilt prejudices, which often are often hidden behind the guise of ‘community guidelines’. But with shadow banning, Instagram is able to work insidiously — it’s hard to challenge or confront something that can be neither fully confirmed nor denied. And given that Instagram’s primary purpose is to make money, and not to preserve some sort of regressive conservative morality, it also sends a clear image about what kinds of bodies are consumable and profitable for Instagram as a corporation. The notion that Instagram is a democratised platform is dead in the water — users are now being forced into playing by the platforms ever changing rules and guidelines. Again, for the casual user, this would be of no great concern — an annoyance, sure, but with little real world impact. However, many people rely on Instagram to make a living. If you are a queer artist, a black artist, a fat artist, a disabled artist, or a sex-worker relying on the only far-reaching site for visual media as a source of advertisement, your job is made easily ten times harder.
So, what can we as an audience do? Surely, a mass exodus of social media platforms such as Instagram is out of the question. As long as we have social distancing, we desperately need centralized places to meet, to share, to discuss and to create. Recently, singer, musician and activist Anohni released a statement through her YouTube channel that she was removing herself from social media entirely, in large part due to the reasons discussed here, and encouraged other artists to do the same. Though one congratulates Anohni for making the move, it is also a fair assessment to say that Anohni, as a renowned artist with a built-in fanbase, can afford to switch to an e-mail newsletter updating people on her projects. For those with marginal fanbases (and that can be by number, or an audience that exists on the margins), this switch is not so simple. Instagram, and therefore Facebook by extension, has created a monopoly over the social media sphere. Nowhere else on the internet draws in so many people, or has the possibility for creating such a huge audience. This is an issue that will continue to be a thorn in the side of artists until a new medium is created. For the time being, as a user of social media, there are things you can do to support your favourite smaller artists. Engage with their posts, share it with your friends, and leave words of support and encouragement. Unfollow those meme pages to make space on your timeline for those who truly need it. And most importantly, keep fostering those communities, so that when we can all leave the house and share the same air again, we are prepared to move beyond these conniving, money hungry platforms once and for all.
