Dear Instagram

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Dear Instagram

Dear Instagram,

I’m cranky. Super cranky.

I don’t know if you know, but I run something called Photo A Day. It’s been going for years now, Donkey Years {4 years to be precise} and started when Instagram was a mere baby.

For years people have been playing along and there’s a pretty awesome community hanging out, having fun together.

None of that makes me cranky, but this next thing does:

NUDE LADIES. Progressively, over this year, there has been SO MUCH spam on Instagram that it’s making me frustrated and frazzled. I go to look at all the beautiful photos and BAM! there’s women starkers, hanging out in my #FMSphotoaday feed. Gross man.

It was like that one time when I was about 11 and I went to play a VCR {thinking it was something like Care Bears} and Dad had left an adult video in the player and my EYEBALLS. They burned. I’m still scarred.

I know that you’re all hanging out with Zuckerberg now, and he makes like a gazillion dollars every second, so I was thinking this: Why don’t you get someone in to monitor my hashtag and kill any spam that dares litter the feed? I’ll send cookies as payment. They might be stale by the time they make it to you, but yummy.

Or just have an emergency button so we can press it and you fly in and kill the porn from Instagram.

I don’t know really, BUT JUST GET THE NAKED LADIES OUT OF MY PHONE.

Yours crankily,
Chantelle

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110 thoughts on “Dear Instagram”

  1. You know you’ve hit the big time when the naked ladies come.
    Should be SO easy to fix. Just three people hitting ‘spam’ and it’s gone. But SM sites are always so crazy slow to act……

  5. I used the good old hashtag latergram a little while back after not having used it for ages and then clicked on the # to find something and got a full frontal nude woman! #nothappyjan 🙁

  6. As a graphic designer I absolutely adore your new look. So clean and easy to navigate and pretty too. I stumbled upon the yuckiness on IG a while back and some of it is really full on pornography. I was quite horrified to find it in my happy place.

  8. Thank you so much for this letter; I hope you did send it to Instagram. I’ve started using just the Facebook page, but I miss sharing on Instagram with my friends. They have young kids, and I don’t want them seeing these ads by mistake.

    • I know that if I needed to recruit someone to fly to San Francisco with me, cookies in hand, to meet with the Instagram people… you would be that person. You could do my nails on the plane, and we could chatter the whole trip. 🙂

      • Think you’d need two assistants … cause they’re the big guys you’d be meetin’ with … just saying!

  13. Oh Telle, I hear you!! For the past 3 weeks I have been getting BOMBARDED with new followers on IG everyday and majority of them are SPAM fake accounts, NUDE/PORN accounts or terrorist-like pages….it’s freaking me out and I have no idea how or why I’ve attracted this influx of junk! I’m having to block soooooo many accounts every single day. It’s really starting to upset me and I’ve hardly posted lately because I have no idea where all these ‘new’ unwanted followers are coming from!
    And I get sooooooo angry when breastfeeding shots or nude baby bums are banned…..but it’s ok to have naked women in porn scenes with every little part on show. Wtf?
    GAH! C’Mon IG you’re my fave – don’t let me down 🙁
    Cx

  14. YES! I quite often use Hawaii related tags to see what’s going on in my Soul Town and now get nudes. Love this doggy pic BTW

  15. Every time I see that spam, I go to the page (grossed out) and mark it as inappropriate to the “staff” at instagram. This is the main reason I don’t look at many popular hashtags anymore… Yours EXcluded. Lol

  16. Instagram SPAM is killing me. I block any SPAM accounts that follow me. The thing that really annoys me is when there is all this SPAM out there but gorgeous images of women breastfeeding or promoting positive body image are reported. Maybe if the good people at Facebook Corp put their efforts into the right place it wouldn’t be such a problem. x

  17. Argh! My hate for spam on Instagram is equal to my hate for like for like-res. Like me because you what to see my feed not because you think I am going to like you back. Which I would like back if they had a cool pics and I want to see more.

  20. Yes, I saw some on there this morning! I reported it, not sure that will do any good? What kind of people? They know it is a huge hashtag, so they jump on it with their inappropriate content, so sad.

  21. Totally agree! It’s so annoying! I’m still laughing at the adult video comment! You poor thing!

  22. I noticed the nudity spam happening yesterday. I don’t mind nudes if it’s classy but these were just trashy. Maybe if they followed the prompts haha. I also dislike the buy stuff spam. I agree that cookies should definitely help.

  23. Absolutely.. its the nakedness on random tags that is just all wrong.. I mean I can get if they get into #dogsofinstagram as some truly are growlers but under #florals ?

  25. I hate it and I hate the fact that I know patents of 8 year olds that let the kids have insta. Its not on! I was having the problem of a lady stealing my photos and posting them as hers.

  26. I haven’t seen any nudity but I want to know when I started following Dubai travel and some of the others that have crept in recently

  27. It makes me so mad too Chantelle. It’s really ruined scrolling tag. I used to scroll it everyday to see everyone’s creative photos but the boobs + bums + handbag spam has stopped me many times. I report them when I see them. And you’re so right. Instagram needs to clean up their act on this. Go get ’em Telle. We are all right behind you! Let us know what we need to do.

  29. Well said! I feel like I need to cleanse my eyeballs with bleach after seeing all those nudies. It makes me cross, because it spoils IG for the rest of us. These pop up all over the place and it seems like nothing is done, but an innocent, beautiful breastfeeding or baby bum photo is pulled quick sticks! What the hell IG? Cookies seem like a good trade for fixing the problem. I’ll throw in some cupcakes if it helps!

  30. I tried to “report” the inappropriate images but there are so many that I can’t keep up. Also, who knows if that even does anything…

  31. The nudie spam on instagram is just ridiculous. I hate to say it Telle, but it’s the reason why I stopped participating for a while. I rarely look at the tag feed any more which makes feel sad and guilty because I’m not participating in the community like I used to. *sadface*

  32. It’s revolting. I saw porn spam at the beginning of this year and blocked and reported the person. Why do people have to ruin a good thing? Sorry that it’s entered the FMS photo a dad hashtag. It’s awful. Just awful. It needs to be blocked asap.

  33. OH yes, hearing you there! I used to love scrolling through & supporting others that posted on FMS daily posts, but all those boobs & arses, never seemed appropriate with my son sitting next to me. I guess because your hashtag is so popular, it’s a quick way to be seen??? It’s such a shame they felt the need to highjack your lovely little feed. cheers Paula

  34. This is exactly what I’ve been thinking Chantelle. I agree that since under the Facebook umbrella (who are not exactly the best for policing spam) I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of spammy stuff. I haven’t seen the nudes but the comments/tags from people selling likes is prolific. It’s so disappointing – you see the number of comments and think they are from friends – such a let down when you have to go through and report them all (and another time drainer). Plus I’ve reported the same accounts several times (and from some accounts I run for businesses too) and they still prevail. This sort of thing has the potential to kill the platform (like trolls are doing to Twitter) – it sucks the life out of the community spirit. You’d think they would value this…. why are they not protecting the interests of big influencers like you who are fostering that community involvement?

  36. I looked up the crochet hashtag the other day and almost vomited my breakfast back up! Full on spread asunder vajayjays! I wish I could scrub my brain clean! And a video of some dude giving himself a hand, so to speak. Revolting.

  37. Oh my goodness I just searched the hashtag looking for this week’s list and all I got for the first 20 photos was naked ladies. Then the next 100 or so we’re 80% naked too. It is horrible. I hate that the good you are trying to put out into the world is being hijacked like this. I feel angry and icky.

  38. I feel sorry for Carly who chooses the fab 4! Can we please change the hashtag daily to include the prompt? Getting rid of spam only works for so long… Xx

  39. Wow, thats not on. I only add my photo a day pics on facebook and the group on there, so I haven’t seen this… Its disrespectful! And people should have the choice whether they want to look at that, not have it randomly popping up like some kind of reverse anti-privacy.

  42. I think they jump on the most popular hashtags. They got onto the freethenipple campaign, and now that hashtag is blocked. I guess it’s a compliment of sorts! Your hashtag is so popular!!

  43. Yikes! I hadn’t had this problem but just posted and after looking at the hashtag… That is a lot of naked ladies. Note – do not open ig on a work computer!

  44. What if we kept using the FMSphotoaday Hashtag to keep it popular, but you came up with a new hashtag that changed monthly like you used to do a long time ago. Then people would still use the FMSphotoaday to post their gross nudie pics, and we could all search under the new changing hashtag? Assuming Instagram doesn’t fix this ASAP. So each post would have #FMSPHOTOADAY and also #FMSPHOTODEC15. Then when we are looking at what has been posted we look for #FMSPHOTODEC15, not look at things tagged only FMSPHOTOADAY

    • Hey! I like you’re thinking.

      Someone suggested this, that we have a daily hashtag as WELL as #FMSphotoaday {in case we ever get it back}. I fear it will confuse the heck out of people, but for instance yesterday was golden so it would just be #FMS_golden or #FMSphotoaday_golden

      What do you think?

      • Sounds like a good idea, then we can search for fms_golden and hopefully not look at the nudies. I hadn’t noticed it yet because I don’t send a lot of time on instagram but I checked yesterday and wanted to bleach my eyes. You’d still want to keep #fmsphotoaday in case we get it back

  45. I spent an hour last night reporting and blocking those spam accounts… I checked back this morning and saw that most of it seemed to have disappeared, so I’m guessing that the mass reporting by people here has done some good… We have an email filter at work that automatically detects if there is too much “flesh tone” in a photo and sends warning emails if too much “skin” is seen – why can’t Instagram do something like this, or delay publication of these images until they have been reviewed? Admittedly it is annoying at work since I work in a clinical environment, and the vast majority of photos I email are to medical professionals of skin rashes or wounds or similar, so I get a LOT of emails checking that I’m not inappropriately sending rude photos at work!

    • YES! Why don’t they have that?

      I checked this morning and there’s more than ever… so I’m guessing you’re not seeing that account anymore because you blocked it.

      Cherie, I want to cry. This is so messed up and I feel so powerless. Can I have a tantrum?

      • Oh no!!! I didn’t think about “blocking” as rendering invisible to my eyes – I might as well have shoved parsley in my ears and sung “la-la-la-la-la”… Now I want to have a tantrum too… I’m afraid I’m cynical enough to believe that Instagram won’t take spam seriously until it crashes its site or in some other way renders Instagram powerless…

  46. Hear, hear! I am so tired of having to block and report spammy and downright pornographic accounts, ugh. And having such accounts hijack hashtags, double ugh.

  47. I haven’t seen these nudie ladies. My beef is with Facebook’s so called hate speech regulators. I saw some truly horrible religious hate speech, reported it, and nup – by Facebook standards it was fine! Let me just say it included derogative names, the a very evil death threat. I was offended, and I am not from that religion. Anyway, I sometimes wonder whether these ‘policies’ or whatever are more lip service than anything else. x

  48. I just noticed this yesterday and it made me so so sad:( I report as many as I could! IG needs to give this some attention!

  49. Yep. Detest the spam on the fms hashtag. Also shocked to see T and A scrolling through the “discover” pages…based on photos I like apparently. Um I like photoaday shots, animals, food and babies.

  50. Oh gosh … I feel exactly the same with you Chantelle. Recently I also checked another popular hashtag that’s normally filled with beautiful pictures, it was also filled with adult images! I’m concerned especially with those younger kids/teens who really don’t need to see those stuffs.

  51. Thankfully my daughter hasn’t discovered hashtags when perusing my Instagram – because ewwwww it’s a scary messed up world out there. They are definitely not having iPhones or their own social media accounts for as long as humanly possible… preferably after they finish uni ?

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