Social media giant Instagram has vowed to reduce ‘inauthentic activity’ on the app in a blog post.
According to Instagram, recently, the app has seen accounts use third-party apps to artificially grow their audience.
Every day people come to Instagram to have real experiences, including genuine interactions.
Instagram acknowledges it is its responsibility to ensure these experiences aren’t disrupted by inauthentic activity.
Starting this week, Instagram will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity.
The app has built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity.
This type of behaviour is bad for the community, and third-party apps that generate inauthentic likes follows and comments violate our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use, Instagram said.
We’re taking a number of steps to limit this kind of unwelcome behaviour.
Accounts that are identified as using these services will receive an in-app message alerting them that the app has removed the inauthentic likes, follows and comments given by their account to others.
Instagram will also ask them to secure their account by changing their password.
People who use these types of apps share their username and password, and their accounts are sometimes used by third-party apps for inauthentic likes, follows and comments.
As per the app, not only does this introduce bad behaviour into the Instagram community, it also makes these accounts less secure.
Instagram also added it knows some people may have unknowingly shared their login credentials with a third-party app, if those users receive an in-app message, simply change their password to revoke their access to their account.
These new measures will be ongoing, and accounts that continue to use third-party apps to grow their audience may see their Instagram experience impacted.
Since the early days of the app, Instagram says it has auto-detected and removed fake accounts to protect the community.
According to the blog post, Instagram will have more updates in the coming weeks on additional measures the app is taking to tackle inauthentic activity on Instagram.
