How does Instagram use AI / ML?
Can you find an industry where AI isn’t present? Chances are, you wouldn’t be able to. AI is one of the most popular technologies on the planet, thanks to its versatility and advanced solutions. It has been growing at a fast pace.
Many giant tech companies using AI/ML to enhance their products. So in this article, we are going to see one giant tech company Facebook and its acquired company Instagram how using AI and ML in their products?
Instagram, the social networking app for sharing photos and videos, launched in 2010. Today, it boasts 800 million monthly active users and is owned by Facebook. There are 70 million photos uploaded to Instagram every day. People interact with each of those posts by showing their love with a heart, commenting, and using hashtags. What all of this activity does is create an enormous amount of data. Once analyzed, by humans as well as increasingly through artificial intelligence algorithms, it can provide incredible business intel and insights into human behavior causing Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom to say, “We’re also going to be a big data company.”
🚀 Here are some ways Instagram uses Artificial Intelligence today 🚀
Explore Page and Search Function
Via the use of tags and trending information, Instagram users are able to find photos for a particular activity, topic, or event or discover experiences, restaurants, and places around the world that are trending. Enabled by tagging, the search tools help Instagram users discover things of interest among the millions of uploaded images.
Target Advertising
In order to make the data that Instagram collects valuable, it must extract customer insights from it. By assessing the search preferences and engagement insights from its users, Instagram can sell advertising to companies who want to reach that particular customer profile and who might be most interested in receiving a particular marketing message. Facebook allows businesses and other advertisers to serve pages straight into the News Feeds of people they had no other connection to, targeting their particular interests and behavior.
As these pages appear, people can comment on them and “like” them, just as they can with anything else that shows up in their feeds. And if people click the like button, these pages will continue to show up in their feeds — and the feeds of their Facebook “friends” — for free.
Instagram’s feed ranking criteria
In order to ensure users find value in the platform, it’s important for Instagram to show them what they will like. As the amount of content grows, finding content that each user will find relevant becomes exponentially more challenging.
To solve this challenge Instagram relies on machine learning, the ML algorithm which is based on your past behavior to create a unique feed for everyone. Even if you follow the exact same accounts as someone else, you’ll get a personalized feed based on how you interact with those accounts.
There are three main factors that determine what you see in your feed
❤️ Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you, determined by past behavior on similar content and potentially machine vision analyzing the actual content of the post.
⏳ Recency: How recently the post was shared, with prioritization for timely posts over weeks-old ones.
👨👩👧👦 Relationship: How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as by commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.
Beyond those core factors, three additional signals that influence rankings are:
- Frequency: How often you open Instagram, as it will try to show you the best posts since your last visit.
- Following: If you follow a lot of people, Instagram will be picking from a wider breadth of authors so you might see less of any specific person.
- Usage: How long you spend on Instagram determines if you’re just seeing the best posts during short sessions, or it’s digging deeper into its catalog if you spend more total time browsing.
Filter Spam
Instagram uses artificial intelligence to fight spam. The spam filter is able to remove fake messages from accounts written in nine languages including English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and more. Once messages are detected they are automatically removed. Instagram uses Facebook’s artificial intelligence text analytics algorithm DeepText that is able to understand the context of a message nearly as well as humans.
Fight Cyberbullying and Delete Offensive Comments
In a survey conducted by Ditch the Label, 42% of more than 10,000 UK youth between ages 12 and 25 reported Instagram was the platform where they were most bullied. With this unfortunate distinction of having the biggest cyberbullying problem of any social media site, they became the first to use machine learning to automatically remove offensive posts, whereas Facebook and Twitter rely on users to report abusive language. Based on the success of using DeepText to identify spam and remove it, Instagram officials began to see it as a solution to identify and eliminate comments that violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines. Humans reviewed and tagged actual Instagram posts to help DeepText learn what would be considered offensive content in certain contexts and what wouldn’t be. If the algorithm finds something offensive, it is immediately removed.
Even though DeepText isn’t perfect, it has received praise from cyberbully prevention organizations for the work it is doing. There is still the risk of misclassifying something as offensive when it’s not or that offensive comments will make it through.
Study the Human Condition
In one study, 100 million Instagram photos were used to learn global clothing patterns. What would have been an impossible amount of data to review is increasingly possible thanks to machine learning. This work showed the potential for machine learning to help extract insights when studying humans and social, economic, and cultural factors around the world. This study exhibited the power of big data and technologies such as computer vision, automated analysis algorithms, and machine learning to comb through enormous data sets that are created by social media sites to gain an understanding of the world around us.
For enhancing its platform for users and advertisers to finding and removing fake or offensive content, Instagram uses the insights it extracts from all the data it collects to improve while others find great potential in the enormous data it collects to uncover insights about human behavior, cultures and more.