Instagram in the Act of Advertising Follower-buying Companies It Banned ⋆ Naijaknowhow

According to a recent investigation, Instagram was found selling ads to companies that sell fake followers to its users. The intriguing part is that Instagram itself banned these services.

In November, Instagram updated its app on Android and iOS and made it clear to its over 1 billion users that those with fake followers will be evicted. Reason being that the third-party apps & bots generating these followers are threats to users’ security. A threat in the sense that usernames, passwords, and sensitive information are registered before these services can assess their accounts.

Some days back, TechCrunch released an investigation that showed Instagram displayed ads of these follower-selling companies on their platforms. It was revealed that about 17 of such services were openly advertised on Instagram.

To this end, Instagram stated that they had weeded off those companies. The Facebook-owned enterprise also asserted that Facebook pages in line with such activities were knocked out.

“Services that offer to boost an account’s popularity via inauthentic likes, comments, and followers, as well as ads that promote these services, aren’t allowed on Instagram. We’ve taken action on the services raised in this article, including removing violating ads, disabling Pages and accounts, and stopping Pages from placing further ads.”

Sadly enough, a day after this statement (yesterday precisely), two ads promoting those services were still discovered on the platform. To add salt to injury, five Instagram accounts of these services were also found.

Coming on the back of a trouble-loaded year (2018) thanks to data breaches and all, this isn’t a good way for Facebook to start the new year.

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All the same, I hope Mark Zuckerberg and his team of nerds utilise their machine learning algorithms efficiently to put a stop to this.