Do you usually use Photoshop a lot in the photos you upload to Instagram? Well, maybe you should relax a bit with image editing. It turns out that Instagram has begun to hide photos that it considers too ” photoshoped ” and, although it has a strong reason to do so, some accounts are beginning to suffer … without deserving it.
Why is Instagram hiding photoshoped photos?
Instagram recently decided to try to deal with fake news and images (the so-called ” fake news “, one of the great evils of the internet in recent times) with a new function that is responsible for pointing and alerting the user in their feed about Photos that are not real. For this, the platform uses a combination of user reports together with an automatic recognition system, which is responsible for pointing out the suspicious content that is then sent to independent (human) verifiers for review and subsequent confirmation as “fake”.
So far so good, right? After all, it is a system that is responsible for detecting images that could disseminate false information and that are ultimately reviewed by people for final verification. The problem arises when this idea fails and they begin to be identified as false artistic images that at no time pursue the malicious intention of the photos against which Instagram wants to fight.
That is exactly what the photographer Toby Harriman denounces on his Facebook , where he points out that walking through his feed he found a hidden and cataloged photo as “False information” and that when he discovered it it turned out to be an artistic image (effectively, edited, but with a totally innocent purpose). This is the image you see under these lines that have colored mountains of many (obviously) false colors:
This puts a big problem on the table: the Instagram signage system is far from perfect and some photos can be sacrificed along the way without having any intention of creating a fake news . Surely an account comes to mind that is dedicated especially to artistic photography and to explore other ways of displaying images in the feed, making quite evident use of photo retouching and Photoshop but with the simple and plain purpose of create new things that impact and attract us.
These types of accounts and their photos could be very damaged on Instagram, since it is not only a matter of seeing a notice in our feed – after all, you just have to tap on “View post” and the image will be displayed again-: this type of posts, cataloged as “False Information”, are removed from the Explore section (so visibility to new followers is reduced) as well as from searches by hashtags (again, users who do not know a certain account will be less likely to find it, if your photos do not appear in your searches).
We will have to see how the social network manages this problem. We assume that it will be a matter of more accounts being affected and beginning to generate noise …
