Youth Incorporated Magazine

Popular social media site Instagram has decided to close the door on inauthentic activity at the hands of its users by employing third-party apps to grow their audiences. This is being done in an effort to restore trust in brands and advertisers on the platform.

“Every day people come to Instagram to have real experiences, including genuine interactions. It is our responsibility to ensure these experiences aren’t disrupted by inauthentic activity. Starting today, we will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity,” said Instagram in a blog post.

They have reportedly built machine learning tools to help them identify these malpractices that violate Instagram’s community guidelines. The accounts that make use of these inauthentic services will be notified via an in-app message from Instagram, informing them that their likes, follows and comments have been removed. The users will then be asked to secure their account by changing their passwords.

Some third party apps may also have users’ login credentials, which makes the accounts less secure. In order to revoke these apps’ access to users’ accounts, Instagram has recommended that they change their passwords. These new measures will reportedly be a constant feature.

“Since the early days of Instagram, we have auto-detected and removed fake accounts to protect our community. The update is just another step in keeping Instagram a vibrant community where people connect and share in authentic ways. We’ll have more updates in the coming weeks on additional measures we’re taking to tackle inauthentic activity on Instagram,” said the blog post.

In the past quarter alone, Facebook has reportedly taken down 754 million fake accounts. Although Instagram has taken measures to tackle fake accounts, the rise in the number of such accounts has prompted Instagram to use even more stringent measures.