Instagram may have a bug, but that’s not the problem
On August 5th, Buzzfeed broke a story about how the Related Hashtag feature on Instagram was being applied unfairly between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The company claimed the issue was the result of a technical bug and announced they would take the feature offline until it was fixed.
My colleagues and I at the Alliance to Counter Crime Online say: make it permanent.
The article was based on a Tech Transparency Project study that found that searches for #JoeBiden or #Biden2020 brought with them Related Hashtags #trumparmy, #Democratsareevil, #jeffreyepistinedidntkillhimself (among others), effectively offering negative commentary along with the search results. By contrast, searches for #DonaldTrump or Trump catchphrases like #MAGA did not show the Related Hashtag feature at all. Not only was there nothing negative, there was nothing but a pure vein of Trump content. When BuzzFeed’s Ryan Mac reached out to Instagram in response to the report, he was told the issue was not intentional but rather the result of a programming error and that they were disabling Related Hashtags temporarily while they investigated.
Again we say: make that change permanent.
Like an AI guide down the rabbit hole of Instagram, the Related Hashtags feature is designed to keep visitors on the platform by algorithmically generating suggestions for further consumption aligned with their interests. Whether you like shoes or heroine, the Related Hashtag feature is meant to provide you with content that keeps you scrolling. The TPP study starkly demonstrated the dangerous potential of the tool to mislead users, but it only scratched the surface. The influence of Related Hashtags extends far beyond politics and disabling the feature will do more than even the partisan playing field.
My colleagues and I at the Alliance to Counter Crime Online have spent the past 4-years working to raise awareness about terrorist and transnational criminal activity on Facebook and its family of platforms. One of the through lines of our investigations, whether the goods being trafficked were antiquities, narcotics, animals or children, has been the ruthless efficiency of predictive algorithms based on hashtags to encourage and enable illicit activity. Instagram in particular has emerged as a major hub for the illegal buying and selling of wildlife and drugs.
When Eileen Carey, a member of our consortium, began following accounts offering illegal drugs including opioids on Instagram she quickly found her feed flooded with drugs for sale and new hashtags to investigate. A recent paper by Tim Mackey, Professor at the School of Health Sciences at UC San Diego, documented that more than 97% of all posts related to the sale of illegal drugs on Instagram employ hashtags; many are purposely misspelled versions of drug names (allowing them to slip by Instagram’s supposedly robust filters) or employ codes to refer to the drugs. While this kind of concealment should be bad for business, Instagram’s Related Hashtag feature works as a matchmaker to help even inexperienced purchasers find what they are looking for — or entice those who weren’t initially looking for drugs at all. Simply liking something posted by a person in the drug trade, perhaps one of the pictures of luxury cars or beautiful women or exotic pets that fill the Instagram accounts of Mexican cartel members, will generate Related Hashtags offering drugs for sale. With opioid related deaths spiking during COVID-19, especially among young adults, that kind of recommendation algorithm is dangerous.
Nor do you have to be a user of drugs or even the platform to have your existence threatened by Instagram. Illegal wildlife trafficking is now the third most lucrative form of trafficking in the world and from ivory to endangered species, Instagram is one of the major marketplaces. A 2018 study by the Cheetah Conservation Fund found that 20% of the global population of cheetahs — one out of every five cheetahs alive — are posted for sale illegally on social media; more than three quarters of those posts are on Instagram, making the platform a crucial factor in the survival of the endangered the species. Though all trade in the animals is prohibited, simply searching Instagram for #cheetah in Arabic (nearly all the posts originate in the Middle East) will yield Related Hashtags such as #cheetahsforsale in Arabic. Turning off Related Hashtags instantly erases that connection and forces both buyers and sellers to work harder to find one another.
Related Hashtags make Instagram a party to the crimes taking place on its platform: not a passive host, Instagram promotes illicit activity by facilitating connections between dealers and buyers. Turning the Related Hashtag feature off and leaving it off will not immediately eliminate crime on the platform, but it is a crucial first step. I implore Instagram not to miss this opportunity. Make that change permanent.
