In the past few hours, two famous photo-sharing platforms, Instagram and Pinterest, have made a lot of talk about themselves, with the first involved in rumors and controversies about young people, and the second protagonist aware of new social commerce agreements.
Almost like in a remote comparison, Instagram and Pinterest, some of the main photo-sharing platforms of the moment, have attracted general attention, in the first case for new controversies and rumors and, in the second, for a new initiative in the field social commerce.
Starting from Instagram, the Meta Platforms Inc photo-sharing platform found itself again involved in an accusation, after the one brought forward by the Wall Street Journal in recent months, of causing harm to young people. This time, the bearer of the “J’accuse” is the non-profit organization FairPlay which has released a synthetic report of 21 pages in which it explains the dangers of the algorithms which, in suggesting what to watch, create self-referential “content bubbles”, some of which are related to eating disorders, as they contain photos and videos that often invite extreme weight loss and very unbalanced diets.
According to the NGO, between December 2021 and January 2022, about 90 thousand unique accounts would have published content in this “bubble” on eating disorders, with the consequence of exposing about 20 million to such content on Instagram. of people, some of whom would be just 9 years old, although the platform is formally forbidden to anyone under 13 years of age. Furthermore, according to the organization’s estimates, Meta would earn something like about $ 227.9 million from users who follow the contents of this “bubble” every year.
Obviously, the response from a spokesperson for Menlo Park was not long in coming. according to which, apart from the fact that it was not possible to access the complete documentation of the report published by FairPlay, the organization in question does not consider that removing certain contents, concerning those facing or coming out of an eating disorder, could cut these people out from the Community and end up exacerbating their situation and that, therefore, a compromise must be found that allows these people to tell their stories. All the more so since, underlines the photo-sharing, that a message is always revealed to those looking for certain topics inviting them to contact a special helpline.
Still on Instagram, from leaker Alessandro Paluzzi, we learn – as far as rumors are concerned – that Meta’s photo-sharing is working on a collaborative collection function in chat that allows you to organize and go back to the best shared posts, including the title and the name of the account with which you collaborate in the drafting of the same. Furthermore, the platform is also working on a safe browsing feature that warns when you end up on potentially unsafe sites that could steal your personal information. In addition, while we continue to work on the possibility of replying to posts with music stickers, it seems now established that the new chat theme dedicated to World Earth Day (Everyday Earth) will arrive in the IG chats.
Moving on to rival Pinterest, however, it emerged that the equally well-known photo-sharing of inspirational boards has launched a new collaboration with WooCommerce, a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create real catalogs of products to sell, thanks to which the merchants who use it, 3.6 million, will be able to easily convert their catalogs into purchasable Pins, and will have – within WooCommerce – a new Pinterest app from whose interface they will be able to “launch advertising campaigns”, import catalogs and will have the distribution of tags.