Why Instagram is cracking down
Yesterday, Adam Mosseri (the Head of Instagram) posted an Instagram reel saying that if you repost content from someone else's Instagram, your content will not be recommended in the feed. Here is a link to the original reel posted yesterday
Instagram has for quite a while, been at odds with content-aggregator accounts that repost videos and memes from smaller accounts. Massive meme accounts, like trashcanpaul (3M), hoodville (15M), memezar (24M), pubity (42M) have been built on this method to the chagrin of smaller accounts.
Here is what Adam Mosseri said:
And the way this works is we try to take a look at everything you post over a month, and if most of what you posted is content from other accounts, we make it so that your account’s content is no longer recommended to people who do not follow you. We don’t get between you and your followers, though.
The problem with aggregator accounts
The issue is this — aggregators sift through small accounts and then download/copy content. The copied content gets immediately pushed out to their followers. Then when/if the original poster’s content gets shown to an audience, the user just swipes past because its unoriginal (from the viewer’s perspective). The actual creator never benefits.
This made it difficult for new accounts to grow. At some point, large accounts noticed you had good taste, stole your content, and left you out to dry. Instagram didnt have reposting until the last 12 months (versus Twitter which has had it since the beginning), so there was no way to credit smaller accounts, and there was no policing of bad behavior.
Adam Mosseri acknowledged that aggregators are an important part of the ecosystem, but he’s also asking them to add their own spin on content that they use (new text, new greenscreen, etc.) or otherwise repost or collab-post to credit smaller creators.
I suspect that Instagram has some pretty sophisticated methods for determining if content has been stolen, especially because speeding-up/slowing down, adding color filters, watermarks, etc. isn’t enough to evade detection. I’m sure their ranking team will try to enforce what they believe to be a fair definition of "original content". I also think it’s likely that this new dupe-finding system is heavily AI-powered using vector similarities and newer LLM approaches to determine similarity.
AI might also be to blame
That brings us to the real potential driver here: AI content
You can now effectively take a piece of content, and use AI to recreate it almost exactly but not not so exact that a deterministic checker would mark it as a duplicate. Eventually Instagram will face this problem (if not already), and really what better way to fight AI with more AI. So one way to view this change is that Instagram is protecting its ecosystem from a deluge of low-effort AI dupes and spam and this is one way to combat and disincentivize it.
Takeaway
The takeaway here is that original content will always win, and this is a theme across all social media (Twitter/X has announced similar measures). As AI reduces the cost of cloning existing content and ideas, more value will accrue to original creators.
Below is a full transcript of the video
If you’re a creator or an aggregator on Instagram, there’s a big change coming this week that you should really know about. Now, about two years ago, we announced that we were going to try to shift more reach from aggregators and people who repost other people’s content to the original content creators.
And the way this works is we try to take a look at everything you post over a month, and if most of what you posted is content from other accounts, we make it so that your account’s content is no longer recommended to people who do not follow you. We don’t get between you and your followers, though.
But until now, we’ve only looked at the Reels you’ve posted over the last month. So we’re trying to give everyone a bit of a heads-up here, but over the next month, we’re going to start looking at your photos and your carousels as well. So if most of what you post to Instagram is someone else’s content, your account is no longer going to be recommendable.
That means that we’re no longer going to show your posts to people who don’t follow your account proactively. You can figure out if your account is caught up in this by going to account status and then checking for your status. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can actually appeal and let us know that we made a mistake.
But if you are an aggregator and you want to still maximize your reach, a few things to consider, because we know that aggregators are an important part of the ecosystem. One is remix the content in some way, shape, or form. Make it your own. You can do your green screen or your own words on top or your own commentary.
The other is if you don’t have a way to make a spin on the content to make it your own, you can either repost someone else’s content using the repost button, which gives them credit where it’s due, or you can actually do a Collab post, again, giving credit back to that original content creator, which we really want to make sure that we are valuing in Instagram and in ranking.
So this is just one more thing we’re doing to try and make sure we are going to be the best possible platform for original content creators. There’s a lot more to come. See you soon. Peace.