After being accused of censoring content in favor of the Palestinian narrative during the recent explosion of violence between Israeli military and Hamas terrorists, Instagram announced they would be making changes to their underlying algorithm.
The change involves giving so-called “equal treatment” to both original content and re-shared posts in Instagram’s popular “stories” feature, with the current system having a “bigger impact than expected” on some types of posts, according to the BBC.
A spokesperson for the social media platform, which is owned by Facebook, explained that the earlier algorithm was built on the premise that original posts should be prioritized since most Instagram users had too many stories to view each day, with Instagram positing that users were “more interested in original stories from their closest friends.”
“It’s also caused people to believe we were suppressing stories about particular topics or points of view. We want to be really clear — this isn’t the case,” the Instagram spokesperson said, as reported by the BBC. “This applied to any post that’s re-shared in stories, no matter what it’s about.”
The change in algorithm comes after some Facebook employees made allegations against the company that there was a content-based bias against Arabs and Muslims.
“Earlier this month, a Facebook software engineer from Egypt wrote an open note to his colleagues with a warning: “Facebook is losing trust among Arab users,’” reported BuzzFeed News on May 27.
“Facebook had been a ‘tremendous help’ for activists who used it to communicate during the Arab Spring of 2011, he said, but during the ongoing Palestinian–Israeli conflict, censorship — either perceived or documented — had made Arab and Muslim users skeptical of the platform,” BuzzFeed continued. “As proof, the engineer included a screenshot of Gaza Now, a verified news outlet with nearly 4 million followers, which, when liked on Facebook, prompted a ‘discouraging’ pop-up message stating, ‘You may want to review [Gaza Now] to see the types of content it usually shares.’”
“I made an experiment and tried liking as many Israeli news pages as possible, and ‘not a single time’ have I received a similar message,” the engineer wrote. “Are all of these incidents resulted from a model bias?”
This engineer did not address the anecdotal nature of their “test,” or that these warnings are usually applied to pages reported by users for sharing inaccurate information or propaganda. The fact that the verified page has a high number of followers has no impact on the accuracy or reliability of its content, or on users who report its content.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who is Israeli, reassured Instagram users that their content was not being removed or censored, and that a “widespread issue” had been addressed.
“Many people thought we were removing their content because of what they posted or what hashtag they used, but this bug wasn’t related to the content itself, but rather a widespread issue that has now been fixed,” Mosseri tweeted.
Many people thought we were removing their content because of what they posted or what hashtag they used, but this bug wasn’t related to the content itself, but rather a widespread issue that has now been fixed.
— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) May 7, 2021