Instagram caught advertising follower-buying services it banned

Instagram is caught selling advertisements to the services selling fake followers, despite claiming to have banned all of them back in November.

There are quite a few services on Instagram which claim to boost your number of followers in no time. Instagram announced in November to have banned all such services. However, hypocritically it continues to sell advertisements to the same services selling fake followers, likes, and comments.

A recent investigation conducted by Techcrunch revealed that despite Instagram claims, it is still selling advertisements to the “banned” companies. As a result of this investigation, 17 such services were found to be openly placing ads on Instagram.

Instagram responded to the investigation by once again claiming to have removed all the advertisements and banned all the services that were violating the platform’s policies.

“Nobody likes receiving spammy follows likes and comments. It’s really important to us that the interactions people have on Instagram are genuine, and we’re working hard to keep the community free from spammy behavior.”

However, unsurprisingly advertisements for two such services were found, just one day after the recent claim by Instagram. Furthermore, five more fake followers buying companies were discovered on the platform during the follow-up investigation.

This has raised quite a few question marks on Instagram’s efforts to protect users from spammers. Anyone can buy fake followers by giving these scammy services their username and password, some demographic details and by paying a small amount of $46 to $126 per month.

These services work by visiting stranger’s Instagram profiles and automatically starts to follow and unfollow them. The objective of placing likes and comments on strangers’ profiles is to generate enough curiosity in them that they end up following you back.

Instagram said they were using AI technology to ban these follower-selling services and apparently this much dependency on machine learning tools is causing all this mess.