Instagram has announced plans to launch a new feature, called About This Account, which enables users to see a variety of details associated with user accounts with a large following.
Viewable details include any username changes accounts have undergone in the past year, the country in which accounts are located, and the advertisements accounts are running. Though Instagram did not specify the exact number of followers an account would have to have to be subject to this feature, presumably only the accounts of large organizations, celebrities, and other popular figures would be affected.
The goal of the feature is to prevent Instagram from being used for fraudulent activity. “Keeping people with bad intentions off our platform is incredibly important,” says Mike Krieger, Co-Founder and CTO of Instagram.
“That means trying to make sure the people you follow and the accounts you interact with are who they say they are, and stopping bad actors before they cause harm.”
Though Instagram spokespeople haven’t mentioned it, the announcement comes after the recent ban by the company’s parent, Facebook, of Burmese dictators from the Facebook platform. In Myanmar, a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing has been going on for years under the military junta that controls the government. The religious majority in Myanmar is Buddhist, while the minority is Muslim, and the junta has repeatedly encouraged mass killings of Muslims on Facebook with unfounded reports of crimes committed by this minority.
Since about 20 million people living in Myanmar report using Facebook as their sole source of news, claims of Muslim criminal activity have been extremely persuasive. Because of this fraudulent activity, about 10,000 people have been murdered.
Many groups have criticized Facebook for taking so long to ban the Burmese dictators—a group of about twenty senior generals and officials—from its platform. The calls for genocide from these officials have been occurring on Facebook since 2014.
In any case, Instagram’s announcement to subject large accounts to its About this Account feature stems from this kind of activity. In most cases, of course, results of fraud and bad acting won’t be as severe, and the fact that Instagram’s service is a bit less versatile than Facebook’s lessens the danger somewhat. Still, Instagram is taking measures to eliminate even this attenuated risk.
Accounts that have verified authenticity will have a blue badge posted on their home pages. Users of popular accounts will need to submit a verification request form to earn the badge. To access this form, users can go to their profiles, select the menu icon, click the Settings option, and then choose the Request Verification option.
The form requires inputting a username, a user’s full name, and a copy of a user’s legal or business identification. Instagram says that none of this information will be shared publicly.