Instagram, Trolling, and Misinformation
It’s been over a year since I’ve gotten off Instagram. My account still exists but I don’t use it and I’ve never been on any other form of social media. Part of the reason I left the platform was that Instagram is owned by Facebook and I was having very conflicted feelings about using the platform given Facebooks role in spreading misinformation. That’s what made the Pew reading so interesting to me. A lot of the discussion around theme two in that piece, which discussed the business model of these companies, reflected my feelings on the topic. I really liked what Frank Pasquale, a law professor, had to say about the fact that things that are anxiety- or anger-promoting often drive engagement and so even if the post is misinformation, platforms have no incentive to take those posts down. I think this economic perspective is really inciteful and really demonstrates why platforms are reluctant to manage trolling and misinformation.
The advice for fact-checking was also very informative and definitely something I’ll apply in the future. I had heard some advice about what fact checkers do when googling something, so advice like scanning all links before you click one rather than just selecting the first result and scanning the metadata beneath each link to see if it seems legitimate but it was interesting to see what methods fact checkers use when they are presented with a website and they want to see if it’s legitimate. I think the tips provided are also very helpful because I think fact checking can seem very time consuming but these videos showed that often times, all you have to do is scan a Wikipedia page. I think this advice is very applicable for when you see something on social media because you can look for the source and then check to see if it’s an accurate source. I know I try to be skeptical of anything I see online that doesn’t have any source at all and if I can’t find a source for it at all, I won’t believe it.
As I said, I’m not really on social media any more and even when I was, I only followed my friends on Instagram and I had a private account where I would only accept friend requests from people I knew. I never experienced any sort of harassment or trolling personally, and I can’t remember ever knowing anyone who experienced that sort of thing either. Because of that I don’t really have a lot of advice for dealing with it. Leaving social media completely is an option, but honestly it’s not one I would recommend first to someone dealing with it because I think chasing someone off the internet is often the point of these sort of harassment campaigns. I think there is something to the idea of not feeding the trolls and sometimes just blocking people and ignoring them is the best move. I honestly think the way these sorts of problems get solved is not on the individual level but on tech companies creating better enforcement mechanism to stop harassment and punish the people acting in that way. But of course the problem is, as pointed out in the Pew piece, platforms have very little economic incentive to stop trolling or kick people off their platforms.
Because Instagram is the one platform I’ve spent time on, I was curious to see how that platform was handling the issue of misinformation. When I did a Boolean search for the topic I found both an academic journal article about it and a post from Instagram. The journal article was very interesting to me because it was talking about how when people who are seen as trustworthy do something as simple as liking a post that contains misinformation, other users are more likely to believe the false information. People seen as trustworthy weren’t people who are very knowledgeable in some topic but are typically celebrities, who may also be bad at spotting misinformation. It was fascinating to me that doing something as simple as liking a post was enough to convince people that information was trustworthy. They didn’t even have to re-share the bad information. The blog post from Instagram was also an interesting read. It discussed how Instagram was going to better flag misinformation by working with factcheckers and covering up posts containing misinformation, as well as removing them from the explore page and hashtags. I thought it was a bit strange that Instagram would chose to just hide posts containing known misinformation rather than deleting it. I think this may go back to platforms having little incentive to delete misinformation. If posts are just covered but users can still reveal them and look, this doesn’t really solve the problem identified in the journal article of celebrities endorsing certain posts through their likes. There’s also the problem that factcheckers can only review so many posts and on a large platform like Instagram, some misinformation can still slip through.
