How Is Instagram Regulating The Posts Of Miraculous Claims?

The Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, Instagram has evolved far and wide into a platform for showcasing hundreds of business organizations. Various businesses promote their products and services through many tactics such as influencer-marketing, buying Instagram followers and posting content and advertisements.

But on Wednesday a Facebook spokesperson announced that their policy regarding diet and cosmetic products is changing. Instagram and Facebook are going to age-gate the posts that promote dietary products and monetarily promote cosmetic surgery. Age-gating will make the posts invisible to all users below the age of eighteen. Moreover, it will ban posts making “miraculous claims” about diet products along with codes or links for buying.

More Details of the Policy

The new content policy, however, is not completely water-tight with restrictions on such posts. Facebook has drawn the line for posts that are meant to promote sales of products, but, precisely what wordings or contents leads a post to fall under the policy is still unclear. Thus, the products could still be present strongly on the platform if the companies take proper cautions.

There is more to it, as Facebook and Instagram are not going to take action directly with diet products and cosmetic surgery promoting posts directly. The authorities will age-gate or ban such posts once users report them. So, the presence of this kind of content is going to be entirely curbed by this move.

A Facebook spokesperson stated that they would remove or restrict posts violating community guidelines once reported by the community. Facebook is going to add new features for reporting such posts. The exact wording of the policy, as stated by Facebook, goes as follows:

Restrict: If a post promotes the use of certain weight loss products or cosmetic procedures and has an incentive to buy or include a price, we will restrict people we know to be under 18 from seeing that post.

Remove: When the content makes a miraculous claim about certain diet or weight loss products and is linked to a commercial offer such as a discount code, it will no longer be allowed under our Community Guidelines, and we will remove it from Instagram.

Reasons for Such Action

Instagram and Facebook are going after posts regarding surgical procedures and diet products, and there is a good reason behind such action. People have been criticizing the presence of malicious posts promising products and services to squish belly fat and makeover the facial and body appearance. Besides contributing to ill practices, many of these products are very much unhealthy and cause irreparable damage to the body.

Social media has also been influencing people to undergo plastic surgery among young people. Social influencers and the emotional appeal of trending social media culture is to blame for such conditions. Instagram is making attempts to undo the ill effects by restricting the posts.

Instagram is mainly that platform crawling with posts of miraculous claims of body modification. Also, several posts of provoking nature are spread all over. The human reviews are going to be a critical factor in the regulation of posts.

Also, posts containing a link to buy or a code of offer, it is more likely to be removed or restricted than a simple promotional post. Posts than even quote prices of diet products may fall under the category of regulation.

There are a lot of promoting businesses and establishing a brand image. Many business houses buy Instagram likes and follow the guidelines of the community on social media to make their market. This step was taken by Facebook’s sister app; Instagram is undoubtedly a step to cleanse the platform.