If you want to score points on Instagram as a politician, it is better to post a selfie than an image with a substantive message. And a nature photo is also not a good idea. This has emerged from research by NOS, De Groene Amsterdammer and Pointer in collaboration with AlgorithmWatch.
Photos with faces are favored by the algorithm over images with text, but also compared to nature photos. The chance that you will see a photo with a face is significantly higher than the chance that you will see any other kind of photo. But with a photo with text, that chance is significantly lower.
The reason is unknown: the precise operation of the Instagram algorithms is a well-kept secret. Much is still unknown after this investigation. Chances are that an Instagram programmer never consciously built in preference, but that users simply prefer to see faces over nature photos. The algorithm may have learned from this completely automatically, without the intervention of a programmer.
Instagram owner Facebook said in a response that its users’ timelines are “completely tailored” to the people using them and that the algorithms take into account a user’s interests. There is no built-in, algorithmic preference for certain types of content, the company says.
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Political messages on Instagram have always been a challenge
It is no surprise to campaign experts: in their experience it is difficult to run on the immensely popular, but visually oriented Instagram campaign. “How do you convey a message while images of people are doing so well? That has always been the big challenge of Instagram,” says campaign strategist Mark Thiessen, who led the VVD’s online campaigns until 2017.
Parties regularly post texts on Instagram, from calls to vote or donate to complete motions. Instagram also does not have a special policy for political messages in the timeline: political texts are therefore just as punished as texts from average users.
Still, there are politicians who know how to take advantage of the selfie-driven Instagram, although they say they do not consciously do so. For example, the posts of Dilan Yesilgöz (VVD), Renske Leijten (SP) and Daniel Koerhuis (VVD), among others, are shown relatively often. The CDA account is also doing well: that account posts many photos of people, including party leader Wopke Hoekstra.
“I have seen Instagram for a long time as my personal channel”, says SP MP Leijten. “I also just like Instagram. Twitter is really my political channel, there is no conscious strategy behind Instagram.” This also applies to Yesilgöz: “I do what I like, work-related messages and personal photos because it makes me happy.”
There are ways in which parties can still convey their message on Instagram. For example, it makes sense to combine text with images. And optimization shouldn’t go too far, Thiessen thinks. “You can be treated optimally by the algorithm, but if you can’t get your message across, it won’t cause anything.”
His colleague Sybren Kooistra, who led the GroenLinks campaign in 2017, also thinks that texts on the visual platform can still work. “People are more likely to share their lyrics storiesThose are short Instagram messages that disappear after 24 hours.
Memes
Despite the research, much is still unclear. So it is not clear how good memes, funny pictures with text, do it on Instagram. Especially the VVD account deals in such images.
“We now suspect that Instagram will place memes lower in the timeline at first, until people turn out to find him funny,” says researcher Nicolas Kayser-Bril of AlgorithmWatch, the organization that carried out the research with the NOS, among others. “But we have too little data to be able to make substantiated statements about this.”
Whether certain types of political messages do better than others, and whether inflammatory texts do better than ‘milder’ messages, is also unclear. That incendiary content would inadvertently do better than milder content has long been an allegation towards the major tech companies. “To be able to say that, we should actually have access to the Instagram systems,” says Kayser-Bril.