Like it or not, you have got to admit: This is the Instagram era. Because of the diaspora of millennials from Facebook, Instagram has taken the crown as the crowd's favourite (together with Snapchat). Gone are the days when couples used Facebook to announce their relationship status; as well as the days when students used Facebook to announce their choice of university. Instagram is the new place to be, with many using a single photo to make announcements. Facebook only has the outdated information; check their Instagram accounts for new (or usually deleted, if the couple broke up) photos just to avoid any embarrassing moments.
Other than Instagram serving as a bulletin board for official announcements, there has been a trend of Instagram users starting side accounts, better known as "spam accounts". Instagram has become a public profile (even if your account is set to private), as teenagers would ask to follow accounts when they first make friends, and requests are hard to reject, just like Facebook friend requests. Since creating a new account takes less than 5 minutes, the rise of the spam accounts occur. Generally, an average university student (yes, average, so I'm not talking about you guys, influencers) may have a follower count from 300 to 800. The number of posts may range anywhere from 100 to 200. Such a student who sets up a spam account will have about 10-20 or 30 (depending on how private he/she is) followers on his/her spam account, and a disproportionate number of posts which can easily hit up to 1000, even.
What are the telling signs of a spam account?
- 99.9% of spam accounts are private accounts (ie. only their followers will be able to view the posts)
- Usernames are usually puns on their real names
- Profile photo either doesn't contain their faces (sometimes it'll be an everyday object), or it'll be an unglam of their faces
- Disproportionate number of posts and followers (extremely high posts count but low follower count)
Unless they have notified you or sent you a follow request, DO NOT SEND A FOLLOW REQUEST.
It's an unwritten rule that you do not send follow requests, as sending one shows that you lack social awareness and it is extremely rude (and somewhat creepy). If you send a follow request, it implies that you have overestimated your level of friendship with that person (ie. while you treat him/her like a friend, he/she may just as well treat you as an acquaintance, or worse, a fiend). The horrors of spam accounts are more than what you can imagine - lies, tears, complaints, backstabbing, gossip. It's a whole wide world inside.
Recently, I've also wondered about an Instagram feature. Instagram launched a function "Stories" not too long ago, which, to be honest, is almost a Snapchat duplicate. However, there are still differences between the two, and one of them lie in the list of people who have viewed your stories. While Snapchat lists the people in reverse chronological order, Instagram doesn't. Instagram hasn't made any official announcements on the way they rank the users, but there seems to be an algorithm to it. The next time you post a story, you may just want to take note. The users on top of that list seem to be the same ones across all the stories, and they will probably be the ones on top of the list of people who have liked your photos as well. Strangely enough, these people may not be close to you, on social media or in real life. The lack of an official announcement makes me wonder if the algorithm includes information from the other platforms under Facebook, such as Whatsapp and Facebook itself. Would people complain about an invasion of privacy if the algorithm did make use of this information?
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