Instagram is making significant changes to the way its system recommends content, with an emphasis on original content and increased distribution for smaller accounts. The company announced the numerous changes in a blog post today.
The biggest change affects aggregators – accounts that download or take screenshots of other users’ videos and photos and repost them. Sometimes aggregators give credit to the original poster by tagging them in the post or caption, but often content is shared without credit and the engagement of the person who originally created the content is siphoned off.
Instagram clearly has a problem with this and will begin removing reposted content from recommendations across the platform. The update is aimed at serial reposters – accounts that share content that they have not “created or improved in a material way” more than 10 times in 30 days. This means that, in theory, your Instagram Explore page or your main feed recommendations will not contain content from aggregation accounts. Affected accounts may become eligible for recommendations again 30 days after the last repost of “unoriginal” content. According to the blog post, this will not impact “a group of publishers” identified by Instagram with content creator licensing agreements or sharing permissions.
Instagram is going a step further than just cutting off repost accounts: the platform will replace reposted content with the original creator’s post in recommendations. The company says it will only replace reposts if the original is “relatively new” and if the system is convinced “based on audio and visual signals” that the posts are identical. Creators receive a notification when their original content replaces reposts and is recommended on the platform. These changes only apply to recommendations. If you follow an aggregation account, you will continue to see their reposted content in their profile or feeds.
Instagram will also begin adding a label naming the original creator – although both the original creator and the account reposting the photo or video can remove the label.
Punishment for aggregator accounts will likely be more far-reaching, going beyond the type of content mill accounts that steal memes or images. Individuals who regularly repost organization infographics could be harmed, as could things like celebrity fan pages or accounts that collect inspiration images from various sources on Instagram. Reposting on Instagram is such a common practice that there are entire apps dedicated to it – but users may think twice about it, knowing that doing so could block their accounts’ discovery features.
Instagram also announced today that it is updating its recommendation system using a new ranking algorithm “to give all creators an equal chance to break through.”
“Previously, Reels on recommended content platforms were ranked primarily based on how an account’s followers interacted with them,” the company wrote in the blog post. “This meant that accounts with the largest followers often achieved the greatest reach.”
To combat this and give smaller accounts an equal opportunity, Instagram describes a system that essentially sounds like a series of beta tests that all eligible content goes through: The recommendation system displays a piece of content to a small audience that might be interested in it, whether they follow the Creator or not. The top-performing Reels in that group are then presented to a wider audience, where the process repeats. It will be interesting to see if this creates the “anyone can go viral” phenomenon on Instagram – in other words, part of what made TikTok so attractive to would-be influencers.
According to Instagram, this change will be rolled out in the coming months.
Reach and engagement on Instagram has been a contentious topic for years, as Meta focuses more on Reels and Recommendations – the onslaught of content you see from accounts you don’t follow. Threads regularly feature Instagram boss Adam Mosseri trying to explain to frustrated YouTubers how Instagram rates and delivers content or why so few of their followers see what they post. However, these updates do not specifically target this issue – in fact, the emphasis of the advisory updates seems to indicate that it will be even more important in the future.