Earning the Blue Badge
To get a blue badge, a lot of followers really won’t be enough anymore. Each account will be judged individually on different parameters!
The criteria for the blue badge will now include a certain degree of notability. This will be measured, in the words of Instagram’s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, through texts in the media that relate to the person seeking verification.In practice, this should mean that even if you are popular among your followers, you won’t get the badge if there are critical articles about you circulating online.
Instagram is hoping for greater transparency and fairness from its new approach to the blue badge.
Diversity as a Big Issue
Diversity has been a big topic for Instagram lately, starting in June after the protests over the death of George Floyd. At that time, the company actually promised to investigate whether any group of users were being disadvantaged on its network.
The media used to evaluate profiles will therefore include more sources from the African-American, Latino and LGBT communities. The aforementioned fairness is to be reflected in the fact that Instagram’s algorithms will treat all its users equally. Along with this, the company is also looking for a new person to serve as director of diversity.
Instagram in the fight against violence
In addition to the blue badge, issues relating to hate content on the network will also undergo a change. For example, sharing blackface speech and attacking Jewish stereotypes would now be banned. Instagram will also turn its attention to rape threats. If such an account is found, it will not escape immediate deletion.
Instagram’s connection to messenger
It’s not a big secret that the owner of Instagram has decided to link all of its communicators (Instagram, Messenger and WhatsUp) in the near future. But while WhatsUp remains untouched, Messenger is expected to be the first to link its features. Specifically, it should include messaging and Stories.
Already, some users have started getting Instagram notifications when they enter messages. In fact, the classic interface has been ported to Messenger’s visuals. People can now reply to specific text, respond using emoticons, etc. Slowly but surely, Instagram is fulfilling its goal of uniting the two worlds into one.
Further changes to follow
The merger of Messenger with Instagram is the imaginary first swallow. The company wants to focus much more attention on Stories!
Currently, while Facebook is trying to share content on the main social network as well, the feature is underused and works virtually in isolation. In contrast, on Instagram, it is possible to publish to Facebook as well at the touch of a button, but the reverse is not true.
Stories has also had major gaps in the content deletion area – here, until recently, deleting one did not result in deleting the other (this has thankfully changed with a recent update)!
The next update to Stories should bring automatic sharing of Stories on Facebook. However, only users who follow you on Instagram and have linked their account to it will see its content. This kind of Stories will be marked with a blue border, as opposed to the rainbow one we’re used to by default.
The last upcoming news could finally merge the number of viewers from both apps. This change should make views from one app instantly translate to the other and vice versa. But the feature is still in test mode and only released to select users. But we already know that we will see more and more similar connections from Instagram.