This past August 5th, instagram shut down its “Related Hashtags” feature, citing a “technical error” in its algorithm that supposedly favored Donald Trump over Joe Biden.
Instagram’s decision came in response to a dubious report by “Tech Transparency Project” claiming that instagram was aiding Donald Trump and hurting Joe Biden.
The report recognized that when you look up hashtags for Donald Trump, the Related Tags were inexplicably missing. Meanwhile, hashtags for Joe Biden returned Related Tags that often were negative towards Biden:
It then makes a huge leap to unsupported theories that:
- Instagram is “blocking potentially negative messages” concerning Trump
- A “Russian troll farm” is likely manipulating the results and interfering
Following will be an examination of both theories.
Often (for kicks) when I encounter suspicious reports like this from private organizations that are used by the government, Big Tech or media to impact decisions, I first check to see if George Soros is helping finance it. The results of this search were concerning.
What are Related Tags?
“Related Tags” are hashtags that help users find similar content based on how often hashtags are used together, such as people using #cats and #cat and #pet in the same post. This helps users discover other relevant content. Users also add these similar hashtags to their posts to attract target audiences.
Shadowbanning #trump
When instagram wants to discourage a hashtag from being used, typically based on complaint volume, most likely an auditor will manually “shadowban” it to block or reduce engagement, thereby discouraging its use. This is a somewhat unusual editorial decision that’s done with caution.
#trump has been under a type of ban or shadowban since before January 23, 2019. Instagram was hiding #trump’s Related Tags, likely to prevent users from easily finding related content or recognizing its popularity. I happen to know this because at the time we were developing automation services on instagram, and a co-worker happened to remark on #trump:
Algorithms And Other Myths
Unsurprisingly, Instagram cited “algorithm error” in response, taking the extreme measure of completely shutting down this popular feature until election. Tech companies love to hide behind “algorithm errors” when getting caught manipulating results, because it’s impossible to disprove without looking at the actual code, and is conveniently protected from oversight as “intellectual property”. Perhaps the “algorithm error” they “couldn’t fix” looked something like this:
One strange contradiction this election cycle is that, despite the sexual assault allegations, corruption investigations, dementia questions, #walkaway and #blexit, Joe Biden has reportedly continued dominating Trump in “polling”. Trump was overfilling stadiums while Biden draws a few dozen, though Covid-19 appears to have given Joe some cover:
What Does The Actual Data Say?
Hashtag counts are the number of times the tag was used on instagram and can serve as a temperature check for enthusiasm. Without Related Tags, it can be difficult to spot the trends. Still, there is a clear lack of enthusiasm in this democrat ticket on instagram, a social platform popular with millennials, simply by comparing hashtag usage as I’ve added here:
These are the top hashtags specific to each campaign, with Trump in red and Biden in blue. You can see that Trump dominates the top 10 most popular tags between candidates, and that Joe Biden’s best hashtag doesnt even reach 10% of Trump’s top 3 tags. You can also see that Biden gains only a tiny fraction of interest relative to Obama, Hillary, Bernie and even Michelle. Biden’s top slogan #teamjoe at 44,000 doesn’t even get 1% of the interest as #maga at 5.8 million!
Did the Trump campaign BENEFIT from removing NEGATIVE messages as the report theorizes? Fortunately, there are tools like hashta.gr that analyze Instagram for Related Tags, without editorial bias. Its results are extremely similar to the Related Tags that Instagram provided, so we can get a very good picture of what tags were hidden when #trump was shadowbanned.
A current search on hashta.gr shows that when you search for #biden the top 25 results include #creepyjoebiden (5th) #neverbiden (10) #joebidenisaracist (17) #sleepyjoebiden (18) #hunterbiden (19) #f**biden (22) #f**joebiden (23) #pedojoebiden (24). Searching for #trump yields just #trumpsucks (14) and #trumprussia (24) for negative tags, and they are used far less frequently.
Using hashta.gr to analyze hashtags on Instagram, we can see that #donaldtrump doesnt currently have negative ones even in its top 20 Related Tags, making those original claims unlikely:
Russia, Russia, Russia.
The report’s second theory was “Russian Troll Farms” were somehow manipulating results. Recall that Kevin Clinesmith recently pled guilty to falsifying evidence to prop up the last Russia theory.
.. or how about that “Russian hacker” in the DNC scandal? Wikileaks has given clear indication that, actually, DNC staffer Seth Rich sent those emails.
This latest, unsupported “Russia hacking” theory seems to be another red herring. The far more reasonable conclusion is that instagram was attempting to reduce Trump’s popularity by shadowbanning Trump-related hashtags. Instagram then used this report regarding their own manipulation to justify even further manipulation to correct (increase) their previous manipulation. They removed a key feature that, despite instagram’s young demographics, demonstrates that Trump is overwhelmingly popular on its platform and Biden is not.
The Latest Shenanigans
On October 29th, the day after the Big Tech congressional hearing, Instagram made another drastic change to its platform. Citing the need to “combat disinformation”, instagram has completely shut down Recent Posts until after the election. One can’t help but wonder if this is about slowing the spread of the Hunter Biden Laptop scandal.
When you look up #joebiden on instagram, you only find 2 posts in the first 100+ that highlight the breaking corruption scandal. The Instagram Recent Posts feature that was just now removed is an immediate display of all content containing those hashtags, so it gives a clear picture of what content is being published in the moment concerning #joebiden, while the Top Posts are curated by instagram. Given the overwhelming popularity of Trump relative to Biden already discussed, one would expect a flood of scandal-related content for #joebiden, and not just 2 posts. This change on the part of instagram appears to be about combating the quickly developing narrative concerning Joe’s corruption scandal.
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