Fergus Goodall-Smith (he/him)
On Wednesday February 26th, Instagram reels switched to demon time. Millions of users started encountering continuous reels featuring violent, malicious, and unsavoury content. Said reels included the likes of a man being crushed to death by an elephant, beheadings, and brutal police bodycam footage.
These videos appeared in people’s feeds with no sensitive content warning. Instagram is already infamous for its ‘gore’ content, a feature its doomscrolling peers such as TikTok and YT Shorts don’t seem to have, but this content was constant and consistent.
‘We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended. We apologize for the mistake,’ a Meta spokesperson said in a statement, providing no further information on the root cause of the issue.
Even stranger was that after the algorithms calmed down and normalcy returned, thousands of users began begging for the return of the gruesome content. Comments of ‘we want more’ and ‘I was enjoying that’ racked up tens-of-thousands of likes.
The bizarre event, which saw a complete lack of content moderation on the platform, raises questions about the true cause of the error. Since Trump was re-elected President in November, tech billionaires have dropped to their knees, endlessly glucking on the Don’s wiener in an effort to catch up with Musk and become a member of the oligarch club, or risk being ostracised.
Mark Zuckerberg is one of these people. Zucc ordered the extermination of fact-checking and moderation across all Meta platforms in January as a part of his efforts to appease the White House, and acknowledged that harmful content would begin appearing more frequently.
Though Meta hasn’t confirmed this as the reason, it’s a timely coincidence, and an example of what the internet can divulge into when safeguards are removed.
