Humanity lives in the globalized world of social media where connection regardless of the location became the norm. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn provide people with a fascinating opportunity to explore the world, stay in touch with their significant others, lead businesses and get jobs online. Indeed, a person without social media accounts is perceived as odd in society, and individuals’ profiles create a portrait they would like to share with the audience (Gentina et al., 2020). With technological progress and platforms’ development, they can provide space for creativity, opinions sharing, education, and selling products.
Although most social media platforms exist for more than fifteen years, there is a lack of legislative regulation. It becomes a reason for multiple legal and ethical issues that are difficult to solve, and usually cause lengthy social discussions and conflicts. Content creators’ rights and social media’s moderation power are almost unlimited (Dommett & Power, 2019). For example, banning a public figure for violating a platform’s terms might look like the latter involves politics or social processes, thus overusing its powers. The same is true for content created by celebrities or people of strong influence – social media can inequality treat them to avoid losing their users. Instagram is the most notable example of the lack of legislative regulation and its consequences as many ethical and legal issues appear throughout its existence.
Instagram is a social network that allows people to share their life via images and videos. The platform has more than one billion active monthly users and includes options to make live streams, advertise, and sell products besides media posting (Frier, 2020). The advantages that made Instagram so famous are that producing and sharing content is one of the best approaches for connecting, finding similar interests, and exploring the world. However, the drawbacks like limited privacy, online bullying and harassment, fake identities, and stolen data make its utilization insecure. The presence of such issues is unacceptable for a platform with a billion users, and Instagram attempts to decrease the insecurity by establishing Terms, Policies and moderating the content (Constine, 2019). Nevertheless, those actions are not sufficient, and question if the platform has a right to manage the publications.
Instagram’s regulative actions and decisions belong to the moderation teams and Facebook’s policymakers. These conditions allow a group of people to influence millions’ lives by managing their content distribution, leading to unfair accounts’ suspensions, subjective decisions, and exceptions for the privileged. In modern times of equity and diversity thriving, it is imperative to maintain the right attitudes towards people’s and platforms’ rights on social media (Gentina et al., 2020). Moreover, content production and consumption created new industries and influenced the economy worldwide (Dommett & Power, 2019). This paper aims to discuss why Instagram must be regulated on a legislative level to eliminate ethical and legal issues.
Multiple cases occurred throughout Instagram’s history that support the thesis about its regulative policies’ opacity. As moderation’s power is not governed at the legislative level, double standards can be applied to content distribution, and celebrities might have more privileges on the platform. Moreover, the police might use publications as evidence during investigations without considering citizens’ rights to privacy. Lastly, produced content can be stolen without an option to prove the theft due to Instagram’s copyright policies.
Privileged treatment of celebrities is common for Instagram because millions of musicians, artists, and influencers’ fans help the platform gain and maintain active users worldwide. Besides, public persons made the network popular: Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber were the first to post and bring broad audiences of new users (Frier, 2020). A decade later, Instagram became a worldwide famous platform, however, users’ rights still have many exceptions.
Every person is equal in front of the law, while Instagram has its own power of justice. The brightest example is the case of Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian’s argument in 2016 that led fans of the latter to fill the comments under Swift’s posts with snake emojis (Frier, 2020). These actions were considered abusive, and the Instagram team was directly involved in the conflict. Platform’s technical team hid the comments under the singer’s posts, and disabled snake emoji use on Kardashian’s account (Frier, 2020). Many people suffer from abuse on Instagram, and the network pays attention only to the celebrities’ cases. Moderators can ban an account for insulting posts or comments, yet it does not affect the quantity of such content. If Instagram had a transparent and equal for all legislative policy, the fear of punishment would decrease the abuse level.
Another confirmation of Instagram’s terms ambiguity is legal issues based on privacy and crime investigations. When a person produces illegal content, they make it visible to everyone by posting it on Instagram. The term “publicly available data” is applied to such images and videos, and many challenges are being faced due to its uncertain connection with personal and private information (Ravn et al., 2020). While Instagram loads only the posts initiated by a user, features like “private account” give people an option to hide content (Ravn et al., 2020). It raises ethical questions about the equity among users: an individual can have an open account and be arrested for laws violation. At the same time, another person can continuously publish their illegal activities without any punishment.
There is no clear legislative statement that the content shared on Instagram is a significant reason for indiction. Cases, where the police use social media accounts to stalk or accuse, are broadly discussed in society. For example, a tourist has been recently arrested in Hawaii for breaking their COVID-19 quarantine after posting a beach selfie on Instagram (Holcombe, 2020). The police found the publication after a citizen’s message and used it as evidence to indict a young man (Holcombe, 2020). According to Hawaiian laws, breaking the pandemic quarantine leads to up to one-year imprisonment (Holcombe, 2020). However, there are no terms on Instagram or legislative statements about using social media posts as a basis for arresting a person.
Content production and distribution face legal and ethical challenges due to Instagram’s internal regulation policy. Publications of professionals like photographers or video makers can be copied or stolen, and the platform’s copyright policies will not be on the victim’s side (Bosher & Yeşiloğlu, 2019). Moreover, published content can be used by other people on Instagram, and it causes law violations to occur and question the literary property at its legislative perception. The case when a digital magazine Mashable was sued by a photographer Sinclair for copyright infringement is an example of Instagram’s policies utilization (Kayser & Roberts, 2020). Plaintiff Sinclair had a public account with the recent works’ posts, and Mashable embedded the images to an article on their website without permission. Instagram stood on the digital media’s side because photos were not only copied, they led to an account where they were posted by the photographer’s own initiative (Kayser & Roberts, 2020). Copyright is the crucial part of an operation for a platform that shares content, and the certainty of the terms is required to solve questionable cases objectively.
The ethical and legal issues described above prove that Instagram’s actions have to be legislatively governed and that its Terms do not provide equal security for its billion users. However, opposite arguments that protect the platform’s regulative policies have to be reviewed as well. Every person agrees with Instagram’s Terms of Use before setting up an account, therefore they must comply with the measures network takes in questionable situations. Besides, content production is people’s own responsibility, and Instagram only acts as a place to share (Gentina et al., 2020). Consequently, a creator needs to comply with their country’s literary property laws before making it public. Lastly, Instagram is a convenient platform for advertising and product selling due to the absence of strict legal regulations.
Instagram’s Terms of Use is the primary document that governs all users’ activities and gives the platform protection in questionable cases. Each user agreed with these regulations if they put a tick during registration, and it is not the network’s fault if they do not read the policies before signing them. The Terms clarify the mission, service the platform offers, users’ commitments and permissions, content management, and the ownership of the rights (Instagram, 2021). Instagram (2021) states that “we want our Service to be as open and inclusive as possible, but we also want it to be safe, secure, and in accordance with the law” (para. 5). Therefore, the platform attempts to provide security without limiting the experience and options offered to its users.
Content production and distribution are the initiatives of its creators, and Instagram acts as a place to share it with the audience. However, the platform has the right to moderate the publications and disable inappropriate accounts. Instagram now bans or hides from the feed not only the content with evident violence, nudity, and drugs promotion but also images and videos with a message close to the prohibited themes. Constine, (2019) points out that “the company specified that violent, graphic/shocking, sexually suggestive, misinformation and spam content can be deemed “non-recommendable” and therefore won’t appear on Explore or hashtag pages” (para. 7). These protective actions make Instagram safer to use for adolescents and people with sensitive minds.
Instagram grew from the sharing photos network into a considerable platform where an entire business can be built as the features allow the users to advertise, sell, and analyze the audiences inside the application. It became possible because of the absence of strict legal regulations in any country, and that freedom gives companies space for creativity. Moreover, with the growth of Instagram’s marketing capability, numerous customized advertisements started appearing and forced users to train their minds to detect deceptive promotions (Gentina et al., 2020). While the platform maintains separation from governments and legislators, it provides more freedom for content creators and provides users with business opportunities.
The influence of social media on lives, politics, and economies cannot be underestimated: platforms became crucial tools to connect, share experiences, and provide goods and services. Such power is not regulated enough, causing different ethical and legal issues to occur. Instagram, the social media with more than one billion monthly active users, is not mentioned in any country’s legislative documentation. It causes unequal treatment of its users by the platform’s moderators leading society to severe conflicts. Moreover, as Instagram has no specific roles, rights, or responsibilities established by laws, police use the content as evidence for indiction while avoiding the human right to privacy.
The content distribution also has plenty of reasons for issues to appear based on the platform’s copyright policy. Bosher and Yeşiloğlu (2019) state that “Instagram should better inform its users of the implications of sharing third-party content as well as the terms of its user agreement” (p. 165.). In case such points as primary users’ rights, privacy, and publications’ copying were described and set on the legislative level, the power of law and courts would help significantly decrease the number of issues.
There are several benefits of Instagram’s separation from centralized government-based regulation. Firstly, it has its own terms of use to clarify the rights and responsibilities, and it is mandatory to agree with them to get services to platform offers (Instagram, 2021). Indeed, occasions inside a network that led a person to severe consequences are not the platform’s fault, and a user agreed with it during the account creation stage. Secondly, Instagram’s right to establish content moderation rules allows them to effectively take action against violent or prohibited publications appearing in people’s feeds. Lastly, business tools are being successfully utilized in social media due to their freedom from strict law-based limitations.
Instagram’s legal and ethical issues appear because such a considering platform has no legislative basis for operation. More than a billion people use social media to share content they produced and have no confidence in its security. Instagram’s moderators rule the process by deciding which images and videos have a right to be publicly seen, and it is unfair in terms of equity. With laws explicitly created for social media regulation existed, numerous ethical questions and doubts could disappear.
References
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Constine, J. (2019). Instagram now demotes vaguely ‘inappropriate’ content. TechCrunch.
Dommett, K., & Power, S. (2019). The political economy of Facebook advertising: Election spending, regulation and targeting online. The Political Quarterly, 90(2), 257-265.
Frier, S. (2020). No filter: The inside story of Instagram. Simon & Schuster.
Gentina, E., Chen, R., & Yang, Z. (2020). Development of theory of mind on online social networks: Evidence from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Journal of Business Research, 124, 652-666.
Holcombe, M. (2020). New York tourist is arrested in Hawaii after posting beach pictures on Instagram. CNN Travel.
Instagram. (2021). Terms of use. Web.
Kayser, S. M., & Roberts, T.D. (2020). Photographer unsuccessful in copyright case over use of embedded Instagram photo. The National Law Review.
Ravn, S., Barnwell, A., & Barbosa Neves, B. (2020). What Is “publicly available data”? Exploring blurred public–private boundaries and ethical practices through a case study on Instagram. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 15(1-2), 40-45.