The Atlantic: Instagram Is The Internet’s New Home For Hate

Instagram has become more and more popular with users all over the world. With the app, users can update the latest images from their friends, as well as look at cute pets from other users.

However, like other platforms, Instagram also has some dark sides that are affecting our daily life in a variety of ways. As a piece of evidence, the platform is offering many conspiracy theories or fake news while some other prominent platforms have made efforts to remove them. That’s why The Atlantic describes the platform as "the internet's new home for hate."

Instagram has many similarities with other social media, such as the massive amount of users and algorithms that enables itself to share the news with hundreds of millions of users. However, one of the clearest differences between the platform and its similar ones hails from the young subscribers. It’s no surprise when the young tend to believe memes of conspiracy theories on Instagram, even they use it as a reliable source to collect hot news.

Meanwhile, YouTube and Facebook attempted to remove New Zealand shooting videos on their own platforms, we can easily find some on Instagram, along with many other videos implying that there was staging in this shooting. Among a series of conspiracy theories, many memes, accounts, and posts available on the platform support for the above theory. And Gen-Z is obviously one of the major targets of such theories.

According to Taylor Lorenz from The Atlantic, when following @the_typical_liberal, she received many follow requests from other users who were connected to a conspiracy called QAnon saying that Donald Trump is now the target of a “deep state”. In addition, the famous app suggested Lorenz follow some far-right celebrities, such as Laura Loomer, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos.

In an interview with The Atlantic, a representative from Instagram said the company and Facebook have kept studying how to detect and remove hate speech that is organized on purpose. At the beginning of March, Facebook decided to fight against fake news concerning vaccines. As per YouTube, the company announced conspiracy videos would be no longer recommended on its video sharing platform. However, the same thing doesn’t seem to happen to Instagram. The parent company Facebook may apply its policies on Instagram but the exact information hasn’t been revealed.