Instagram to change order that posts appear in news feed
App looking to penalise accounts that re-post others’ reels and videos, head says
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Your support makes all the difference.Instagram will change the order that posts appear in the news feed, it has announced.
The company will look to highlight more “original” content, rather than posts that have been re-shared from elsewhere, according to the app’s head Adam Mosseri.
That will mean it will show less posts that simply share Reels, Instagram’s TikTok competitor, for instance.
“This is specifically focused on the idea of originality,” Mr Mosseri said in a video announcing the change.
“If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else. We’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content.””
It is one of a number of significant changes Instagram has announced in recent months as it looks to fix problems with stagnating users and threat from other apps such as TikTok.
Mr Mosseri said the latest changes were intended to help boost work by people making content.
“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,” he said.
It will also come alongside other changes such as the rollout of product tags so that people can more easily sell content through their own posts.
In a response to a question on Twitter, Mr Mosseri said that the company is looking to proactively recommend more content and as a result wants to showcase those accounts that simply re-share other posts less.
“As we lean more into recommendations it’s becoming increasingly important that don’t overvalue aggregators, as that would be bad for creators, and therefor bad for Instagram long term,” he wrote.
He also admitted that Instagram has no way to know “for sure” whether a certain image or video was actually being shared by its original creator. But it will seek to use a range of technologies, including scanning the video to see who is in it and if it has been uploaded to Instagram before.
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