Instagram may be coming after your profile
Instagram has a new update that tracks down manipulated images. Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
By Kemi Omorogbe, Staff Writer
Instagram has such a big influence on the masses that the app has led to people using the social media platform to display their best possible selves. Instagram used to be all about adding a filter and a few embarrassing words to your selfies, but it has evolved. People aren’t just using filters anymore, they are editing and manipulating their photos to look slimmer, smoother and curvier.
This Photoshop manipulation may come to an end though, because Facebook, who bought Instagram back in 2012, has announced that any image believed to be manipulated, will be flagged. This is meant to stop the spread of misinformation on the platform, and increase transparency between what is real, and what isn’t.
You may ask, how is this possible?
Instagram has said they will take the information from users and technology to figure out who or what may not be as real as they seem.
When the first sighting of this update took place, people thought the images were going to be taken down once figured out by these IG bots, but that’s not the case.
According to Instagram’s statement: “We don’t hide content because it’s photoshopped, we apply a label when a fact-checker has rated it. Upon review from the fact checker, they changed the rating, so it is no longer being labelled as false on Instagram and Facebook.”
Now that Instagram has updated their terms to track down any photoshopped images, maybe we will see the honest truth about the pictures displayed all over the web and really get the understanding that not everything is as real as we once believed.
Social media platforms like Instagram, which focus more on one’s personal identity, has really shaped societal norms which motivates people to create a real or fake persona that falls in line with the rest of the world.
The creation of these personas is what causes photo manipulation and it’s something that is so ingrained into society, that it may be hard to let go of, even with this fact-checker Instagram has implemented.
People may not stop with Photoshop, so we may have to rely on these technological fact checkers to get to the bottom of these fake images, but technology can be very unreliable.
There can be many problems that can arise when technology analyzes images — racial or gender bias are just some of these issues.
So as we utilize this new update, we have to think about if it really is helping the problem of societal standards or creating new issues that we aren’t quite prepared for.
Although we will finally get some truth on Instagram, we have to ask ourselves if it’s worth any possible future mishap.
Will this change the way we use Instagram?
For now, we have no clue — all we can do is sit back to see if Instagram’s new terms really make a difference on our feeds.
