Instagram starts flagging photoshopped images

Facebook owned Instagram has now started flagging fake photos with their False Information Feature in an aim to make the platform safer and fight the problem of fake news.

However, users are not happy with this new implementation of the feature as it seems to be a lot more aggressive then expected and most users cannot share many types of photos that they used to.

Toby Harriman who is a photographer based out of San Francisco took to Facebook to share his experience and said that he was scrolling through his Instagram when a pop up came across his screen warning him of “False Information”.

He clicked on the post that was hidden in order to see and turns out it was a simple photo of a man standing on a mountain and the mountain was just edited to look rainbow colored.

He said that he supports the ability to better differentiate between real vs. Photoshop but he still respects digital art and thinks that this feature might be going a bit too far.

The feature will remove these photos from the Explore and Hashtag pages and these will be flagged in future posts too.

So basically this new False Information feature Instagram is working with will be flagging digital art as “fake images”.

Instagram said that this feature works through feedback from the users and the help of technology. Photos are recognized and passed on to third party fact checkers who take a look at the photos to confirm whether they are fake and then the image is hidden with a warning and the user needs to click on it to open it.

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