I started writing this post about a month ago to raise one problem in particular: the way Instagram keeps showing posts from accounts you’ve told it not to show.
In particular Instagram was repeatedly showing me posts from the Murdoch tabloid NY Post. So I clicked the three dot menu and selected ‘Not interested’ and chose ‘Don’t suggest posts from nypost.’ Easy.
Instagram immediately showed me more:
What is going on?
A few weeks ago things got markedly worse.
It should surprise nobody to learn that I oppose the Israeli genocide in Palestine. I’m also queer and trans. Instagram knows this about me — from the gender pronouns in my profile and the data it holds on what posts I engage with.
So why the fuck does it continue to show me posts from Zionist, Islamophobic, anti-gay and anti-trans cesspit the NY Post after I explicitly told it not to?
This is not a one-off. My Instagram feed repeatedly features anti-psychiatry. I live with ‘an alphabet of mental illness’ and I’m lucky that it responds to medication and my experiences of psychiatry have been voluntary and compassionate.
Many people with mental illness have had very different experiences of psychiatry and I respect their insights and experiences as valid and important. But I have been personally harmed by antipsychiatric beliefs held by a parent, so it’s a bad time for me when that discourse turns up in my feed. I turn it off:
And it continues to show up in my feed:
Why is Instagram doing this?
In a nutshell, it is ragebait. Instagram’s developers know that if they repeatedly show this crap, I will get annoyed, and when I’m annoyed, I’m more likely to give into the urge to comment, and then I get into fights with other commenters, which generates a nice increase in the measures of engagement that define success for a social media platform.
Once you recognise this pattern it can’t be unseen.
I’m nonbinary, which is a transgender identity, so Instagram shows me anti-trans posts by ‘gender critical’ Christian evangelists and literal fascists like One News Australia. It also shows me deranged posts by anti-queer transexuals (T without the LGB, I guess).
(Yeah, that’s my handle in the comments. Fell for that one. Not proud of it. For the record, the term transsexual is a recent (early C20) invention by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The ‘blueprint for the entire identity’ is the trans and nonbinary Black, Indigenous and people of colour in the non-Western cultures that Hirschfeld studied in order to theorise transsexualismus.)
So we have a number of problems here:
- Instagram is non-consensually showing me posts;
- It is lying about letting me block those posts from my feed;
- It is trying to manipulate my emotions to juke its engagement stats.
What fresh hell is this?
In the tsunami of AI anti-hype that is currently washing over my social media it’s common to hear talk of ‘AI psychosis’ that prolonged exposure to sycophantic chatbots can supposedly induce in users who were previously mentally stable.
This behaviour by Instagram’s post suggestion algorithm betrays all the hallmarks of psychosis. Now, I live with bipolar disorder and I’ve had one prolonged episode of psychosis when I was severely traumatised and living in unsafe housing. I witness people use the term ‘psychotic’ as a pejorative without understanding what it means or what it feels like, and I am using it advisedly.
Specifically, the Instagram algorithm is displaying aberrant salience — which refers to one popular theory of what happens in the brain during psychosis. Think of the LLM whose matrix of weighted associations was tweaked to heavily weight the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge. It suffered from aberrant salience: in every interaction it placed too much salience on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is so driven by a particular goal — engagement — that it is obsessing over particular themes and returning to them again and again without resolution.
It has lost touch with external reality, i.e. it is ignoring the explicit signals I am sending about my interests and limits and what kind of social media content I am consenting to receive.
Obsessive. Non-consensual. Fuelled by rage. Disconnected from reality.
I’m stuck with Instagram. I have to have an account to use it for work, and many of the creators and news sources I follow only post their work and articles there. But I view it as increasingly dangerous to mental health.