Instagram accounts be set to "private" to selectively determine which people can see your account. This is a very nice function for young kids that require some protection from "the internet", but can also be useful for adults that value their privacy.
However, more than often this "private" setting is abused as a way to get more instagram followers. For example, the account "@memezar" has more than 20.000.000 (!!!) followers, but has its settings on private....how can such an account ever be "private" with 20 million people watching.
The main problem with these accounts is that they encourage people to share their posts with "your friends", which results in them getting linked posts that they themselves cannot see withouth following the account.
Because they are often very eager to see the post, they follow the account, but cannot see the post because their "follow request" has to be approved first...which may take multiple days.
After multiple days most people have already forgotten their "follow request" and are now following an Instagram account they have never heard of.
Although this may not seem THAT problematic. It saddens me that Instagram as a platform is getting increasingly more "locked away" because people put their accounts on private to get more followers. People should not need to follow an account before they even know if they like what that account is posting.
Furthermore, these accounts use their high amount of (semi-involuntary) followers to get big deals with brands, using this private-technique as a means to make money.
Instagram has already performed some slight adjustments to discourage this behaiour sich as removing the "swipe up" function (commonly used by influencers) from private accounts, but this is not enough for most accounts to forfeit their "private" status.
I hereby suggest one of the following solutions:
1. Make it impossible to send stories and/or posts of private accounts to people that do not already follow the pirvate account. This removes one of the major pathways for these accounts gain followers and stop the 24/7 DM's filled with posts you cannot see. This does however not stop many semi-celebrities from abusing this function to get more followers in general, but it's a nice half measure nonetheless.
2. Preferably, make it impossible for accounts with more than 10.000 followers to be set to "private". Nobody with more than 10.000 followers cares even a little bit about "privacy" as their 10.000 followers can easily screenshot/screencap their posts and send them to their friends.
3. Alternatively, the process of mass-accepting follow requests on private accounts should be hindered through things such as:
3a. When an account is set from private to non-private, all pending follow requests are not instantly accepted, but are instead deleted.
3b. Manually accepting follow requests becomes much more time consuming by frequently adding small puzzles such as reCAPTCHAs. Optionally, the occurence of this happening could be based on the follower count to not hinder "legit" small accounts that would like to stay private for personal reasons. Logically, solution 3b is an addition to 3a.
The above stated solutions should be very effective in decreasing the amount of "private-status-exploitation", but other ideas are more than welcome as well!
Together we can rid this platform of one of its many pests! Sign the petition!
