Problems follow worried Facebook users defecting to Instagram
Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for US$1 billion, is a lone bright spot for its parent company, which is in crisis over its handling of people’s private information. ‘‘I will delete Facebook, but you can pry Instagram from my cold, dead hands,’’ read a headline on tech news outlet Mashable.
But as more people join the #DeleteFacebook movement, some Instagram junkies are getting worried. Facebook-like problems, such as trolls, political conflicts and judgmental friends, are already cropping up there. There are also more and more ads, plus lecherous or spammy messages and ‘‘fake’’ news and followers.
Don’t even get users started on Instagram’s controversial decision to switch from a chronological feed to a computer algorithm, or on the growing number of carefully edited posts eating away at the raw authenticity that made Instagram special.
And now they say they have bigger, scarier concerns. They fear that third parties may have obtained access to their data on Instagram without their knowledge or permission, just like on Facebook. And they are starting to wonder if Instagram, which already was a target of Russian interference, will become even more treacherous in the US midterm elections.
Instagram says about 20 million people saw content on Instagram from fake Russian accounts. It says it allows software developers access to information about users, to help businesses understand them; to help users share their content with a third party, such as a photo printing service; or to help broadcasters and publishers find content.
Troubling disclosures that Cambridge Analytica used vast amounts of data from Facebook to build profiles of American voters to help Donald Trump’s campaign have spurred some Facebook users to delete their accounts and seek refuge on Instagram. Many social media users say they have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on Instagram, with some of them citing the bitterly divisive 2016 US presidential election as the reason.
Some 800 million people log in to Instagram at least once a month, 500 million of them every day.
And while the share of Americans using other social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest – has remained about the same, Instagram has seen an uptick. Thirty-five per cent of US adults use it, an increase of seven percentage points from 2016, according to Pew Centre Research.
Instagram’s nascent advertising business is flourishing, too. The mobile app, which had 30 million users and zero revenue when Facebook bought it, is expected to reach US$10 billion in revenue by 2019.
Credit people such as Kim Delatorre, a 43-year-old blogger and mother of three from a small town in Idaho who settles down with Instagram at night after everyone else is asleep to follow updates from her nieces and the cast of The Walking Dead.
‘‘Facebook used to be my favourite place to find out how my friends are doing and what everyone is up to. Now I use Instagram for those updates,’’ Delatorre says. ‘‘That is my time, and I adore it.’’
From the start, Instagram was a mobile app that revolved around snapshots, not snippets of text. Research from the University of Oregon suggests that perusing more images and less text is associated with increased happiness and satisfaction and decreased loneliness.
Instagram has also received an assist from a rival, messaging app Snapchat. Driving the latest surge in popularity is Instagram Stories, a copycat of a popular Snapchat feature.
Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger envisioned Instagram as a kinder, gentler place where people could freely and safely express themselves. But as the online world has become uglier, more Instagram users are complaining that they are getting mocked, harassed and bullied.
People also complain that Instagram, with its carefully composed photos, feels too much like flipping through the pages of Vogue and not enough about getting to know real people and their lives, says Doran Poma, a 31-yearold aesthetician from Monterey, California.
‘‘It is so over-curated from every angle,’’ she says.
That inauthentic feeling is one of the reasons Menucha Citron Ceder, a 28-year-old blogger from New York, stays faithful to Facebook, though she’s spending longer stretches on Instagram, as are her peers.