Instagram and Chain Letter Spreading
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/style/instagram-photo-law-meme.html?searchResultPosition=8
This New York Times article revolves around a new supposed Instagram rule that would allow Instagram to use its users’ photos however they want, even in court cases against the user. The article also describes how an image was being passed around Instagram detailing this new Instagram rule as well as stating that users could prevent Instagram from using their photos by simply by copy and pasting a statement disallowing Instagram to use their pictures, posts, or messages.The message is similar to “email chain letters” which are emails that tell the recipient to forward the email multiple people. Often times, these email chain letters pose a security and privacy risk and are nothing more than a hoax. The same was true with this Instagram “new rule” situation; however, it gained a lot of traction from public figures also posting and reposting the image.
The article states “the spread of a single viral message on Instagram appears to be more of a top-down process, finding audiences in the manner of a product or trend promoted by influencers.” I thought this was very interesting because it begins to illustrate a network in place. We can model this hoax image spreading as a social network with an Instagram influencer or public figure as the ego of the network and information, which in this case is the “bad information” about Instagram and their policy, is passed from the ego to followers of the ego. The flow of the bad information can be shown with directed edges between the nodes (users) because the hoax messages travel only from one user to another. The directed edges further illustrate how big the role of Instagram influencers can be in a social network to spread information and, more dangerously, misinformation. In contrast, the article mentions how Facebook hoax information spreading in the past usually “rises from obscurity”. I think this could be similar to how a spam bot may try to send misinformation to a use and hope it sends it to a clustered part of a friend network. However, on Instagram, the system of followers in used and this means that if misinformation reaches a popular user with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, it can be spread really quickly if that Instagram influencer decides to repost it. Using a social network, we can see how the platform of Instagram is able to spread information from egos to the followers of the ego.