Instagram 'bug' reportedly favors Trump campaign content over Biden
The hashtags for both the president and his Democratic rival have been treated differently since at least June, Buzzfeed reports.
Instagram algorithm reportedly favored Trump hashtags since June.
A bug in Instagram's algorithms reportedly pushed content favoring President Donald Trump's reelection campaign over that of presumptive Democratic rival Joe Biden. A search for Biden showed a variety of pro-Trump content, while searches for Trump didn't provide hashtags promoting alternative viewpoints, Buzzfeed reported Wednesday.
Hashtag searches for #JoeBiden produced over 390,000 posts tagged with the former vice president's name alongside related hashtags chosen by Instagram's algorithm. These posts also featured pro-Trump tags, Buzzfeed noted.
Similar searches for #DonaldTrump reportedly showed over 6.7 million posts that were tagged with the president's name, but didn't push any related hashtags showing an opposing viewpoint.
Nonpartisan tech watchdog group Tech Transparency Project came across the bug, according to Buzzfeed. The hashtags for both Trump and Biden have been treated differently since at least June, it said.
The "technical error caused tens of thousands of hashtags to not show related tags," Instagram told CNET on Thursday.
Many other hashtags were affected, including #democrats and generic terms like #artofdrinks and #menshair, the Facebook-owned social media company said. However, other terms associated with Trump, including #trumppence2020 and #votetrump, were unaffected by the bug.
Instagram is disabling this feature so it can further investigate, it said.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the Biden campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
Services and Software Guides
VPN
Cybersecurity
Streaming Services
Web Hosting & Websites
Other Services & Software