The Challenge
Young people use Instagram to explore and find their identities. This makes the platform an ideal place for extremists to radicalize young people. Especially since Instagram only removes 18.8% of hate content that exists on the platform.
Studies done by Cybersecurity For Democracy have shown that "hate content" is the content with the highest engagement rate, which makes it extremely lucrative for Instagram to keep up.
So how does The Non-Violence Project Foundation (NVPF), a Swedish NGO that fights violence both online and offline, get the world's largest social media company to take responsibility for the content on their platform?
The Idea
Follow Their Leader uses Instagram's own algorithm to prove that the lack of self-regulation on the platform is a matter of profit, not technology. Instagram's algorithm automatically cracks down on accounts with a rapidly growing number of fake followers. Why? Because fake followers are a threat to Instagram's economic model, as companies spend fewer ad dollars if they suspect that views, likes, and comments are not real, but simply coming from fake followers.
How does it work?
Follow Their Leader is a crowdfunding platform where users can buy fake followers for extremist accounts. 6 popular extremist accounts were selected, all violating Instagram's own Terms & Conditions. Once the donation target was reached, NVPF purchased fake followers through a third party for the selected accounts. The increased number of followers triggered Instagram's algorithm to react. First by shadow-banning their accounts and ultimately removing the account permanently from the platform.
The campaign
Follow Their Leader was first launched on social media in subgroups on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Instagram, aimed at people who sympathize with the NVPF's message to avoid alerting the extremists who we targeted.
After a few weeks, the NVPF revealed in an open letter addressed to Instagram that they had hacked Instagram's algorithm. The open letter ran on social media both as text and film to put public pressure on Instagram to begin a dialogue with NVPF.
In addition, NVPF bought media space on a billboard truck, which played the open letter film on repeat for 8 hours in front of the entrance to Instagram's headquarters in San Francisco.
The Results
The campaign not only revealed how Instagram ignores extremists and other hateful influencers on its platform. It did something about it. Follow Their Leader shadow-banned all the selected extremist accounts by mobilizing enough people to buy hundreds of thousands of fake followers. Through the initiative, the NVPF held the world's largest social media company accountable for the content on their platform by using their own technology against them. And it worked. Meta will now meet with The Non-Violence Project Foundation to discuss how Instagram can enforce their own guidelines.