Meta has confirmed a major update for the Instagram content suggestion algorithmnow causing the social network to prioritize original content producers – and penalize what it called “serial republishers”.
The term applies to accounts that exist solely for the purpose of stealing content: a particularly interesting reel is downloaded by one of these accounts and reposted as if they were the author, effectively driving engagement for them, not the original author.
The problem is a constant complaint from users and content creators. Adam Mosseri, who heads Instagram and Threads globally, is constantly the target of questions about the functioning of the algorithm – the executive almost always appears talking to users, providing accounts.
However, as Instagram began to prioritize Reels over other content, the post recommendations you see also began to show a surge of short videos from accounts you don’t follow. Until then, however, the social network’s algorithm did not differentiate the author’s content – merely, it saw the engagement numbers of a post and delivered it to more users as “hot content”.
Content “pirators” noticed this detail, capitalizing on it and stealing other people’s materials only to repost it themselves, and stealing the audience numbers from the original creators. TudoCelular itself has been a frequent victim of this type of piracy.
Without going into very technical terms, Instagram confirmed that the algorithm can now identify the origin of content beyond the account that posted it, analyzing whether the material viewed actually comes from that profile.
When identifying inconsistencies, the network itself – through its artificial intelligence (IA) – will remove the offending content, penalizing the account behind the piracy. If the account has engaged in this activity 10 or more times in a 30-day period, they will be temporarily removed from the “Explore” tab, the tab within the Instagram app where top content recommendations come from.
The more expanded time window, according to the network, has two functionalities: the first is to take down “serial aggregators” – accounts that make a living from this practice and commonly publish dozens of stolen content every day. The second is to separate these accounts from, say, reposts that are commented on or that add more content to the original material (such as “reaction” videos to topics, for example). These remain protected and recommended normally.
Furthermore, Instagram will add identification tags that credit the original creator. There are cases where aggregators mark profiles that originally own certain content, but the overwhelming majority of these profiles do not offer this, in order to avoid being discovered and reported.
Finally, the algorithm also has a “new ranking system” which, according to Meta, “will allow all content creators to have equal chances of engagement and fame”.
Explaining: Currently, Instagram recommends content through an engagement-based system. In practice, it is not so much the total number of followers that determines whether you “appear”, but rather how much your current followers interact with what you publish.
The problem is in practice: although this foreshadowing works on accounts with a few thousand followers, truly gigantic audiences – something like “millions” of followers – still had an advantage, being served to more people.
The new idea uses a “beta delivery” system, for lack of a better term: content coming from gigantic or smaller accounts is served to a small, random portion of users. Engagement with this portion determines that content delivery gradually increases and, thus (at least, in Meta’s view), smaller and larger creators will have equal chances of going viral.
The new measures are already in the implementation phase and should begin to be noticed in the coming days.
