Skip to main content

Instagram wants more ‘original’ content on its platform

More features, more original content? It seems Instagram is banking on the former to facilitate more of the latter.

On Wednesday, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced via a tweeted video three of the photo-sharing app’s latest features. In the video (and its tweet), Mosseri explains that these three features — product tags, enhanced people tags, and adjusting rankings for originality — are part of an effort to support creators and ensure they “get all the credit they deserve.”

Recommended Videos

📣 New Features 📣

We’ve added new ways to tag and improved ranking:

– Product Tags
– Enhanced Tags
– Ranking for originality

Creators are so important to the future of Instagram, and we want to make sure that they are successful and get all the credit they deserve. pic.twitter.com/PP7Qa10oJr

— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022

The expansion of the product tags feature was officially launched on April 18, and allows all public accounts to tag products in their photos. In the video, Mosseri said the newly expanded product tags feature lets users “drive some traffic or attention to a business or a creator or a company that you love, that you’re interested in.” Product tags are still only available for photo posts at this time.

The second feature Mosseri discussed was enhanced people tags, which is essentially an option in which users can identify themselves as a category (like “photographer” or “stylist”) and have that category appear as part of their tags in photos and videos, alongside their usernames.

The third feature mentioned in the video, and probably the most important, is what Mosseri’s tweet referred to as “ranking for originality.” Essentially, it’s Instagram adjusting its rankings to value original content more than reposted content. Whether or not this is good news or bad news depends on which kind of content you post. If you primarily aggregate content and repost other creators’ content, it means you’ll likely garner less attention on Instagram for your posts. If you produce original content, this is likely a boon for your work if Instagram’s newly adjusted rankings really do consider original content as more valuable.

Either way, if Instagram wants more original content (and less reposts of content from competitor platforms), then of the three changes Mosseri announced, this last one will probably be the most effective way to get there. But it’ll have to get the rankings right, which means correctly defining and identifying what “original content” is. In a response to a Twitter user’s question regarding that, Mosseri offered a simple definition of originality, but also admitted that identifying it may prove difficult:

“The idea is if you made it, it’s original. It’s OK if you edited it outside of Instagram and then bring it in via the gallery. Identifying ‘originality’ is hard though, so we will iterate over time.”

Anita George
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
Twitter’s SMS two-factor authentication is having issues. Here’s how to switch methods
A person's hands holding a smartphone as they browse Twitter on it.

It might be a good idea to review and change your two-factor authentication options for Twitter. Elon Musk's Twitter has another issue for its users to worry about.

Twitter has reportedly been having issues with its SMS two-factor authentication feature (2FA). According to Wired, beginning as early as this past weekend, some Twitter users have reported difficulties logging in to their Twitter accounts due to the app's SMS 2FA feature not working properly. Essentially, the feature relies on the app sending users an authentication code via text message, which they can then enter as a second step in the login process.

Read more
Twitter has reportedly suspended signups for Twitter Blue
Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

The start of Elon Musk's tenure as owner of Twitter has not been without its struggles and chaos. And so far, the chaos Twitter currently finds itself in shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

So it seems fitting that the latest news on the Twitter front is that signups for the microblogging platform's $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription have reportedly been suspended. On Friday, Forbes reported that new signups for Twitter's newly revamped Blue subscription have apparently been disabled, having "verified that users have not been able to sign up to the service for more than an hour," and also citing that the option to sign up for Blue on the iOS app had disappeared as further proof of the suspension. The Verge also noted that some users may still see the option to subscribe, only to then be met with an error message. One of the editors at Digital Trends said the option to sign up for the service is just missing from his iOS app's menu, noted that it had been like that "since at least 8 p.m. PT last night," and shared the following screenshot:

Read more
Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them
Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Read more