What's Tap Magic, and Why It’s Taking Over Instagram

The "double tap" spam image takes many forms. Some of the pictures are blurry, others generic enough to be stock photos. Often they’re mildly pornographic—seedy cartoons and pictures of celebrities with camel toe. Many are visual non-sequiturs, blandly pleasant images which don’t make sense. Then there are the sentimental, crudely drawn memes like this one of a woman and a man on his knee in front of her (aesthetically they owe a lot to "One Weird Trick" clickbait).

Image: so_art_less/Instagram

Some pictures make demands in the captions. Comment a single word; "stop" or "fall" (on a picture of a man hanging off a rock) or "ass" (a picture of Iggy Azalea and her nameless "New Boyfriend"). Others dispense with instructions entirely, and just circle a salacious detail in red.

Of course, under almost every one there are comments from angry people saying they double tapped and nothing changed.

What is going on here? Why would users expect "magic" from their Instagram feeds, and why would the creators of these memes promise it?

Image: xo_art_less/Instagram

It doesn’t take long to unearth whole accounts dedicated to propagating this spam. One takes the concept as its title: @doubletap.me’s Instagram feed is private, but their images are viewable here. There are "double tap sticker" apps all over the internet (including in the App Store) which let you brand your pictures with the instruction ("double tap to high five," "double tap to rock on").

What do these weird pictures gain for those who post them? Are they gathering followers for a more malicious spam attack at a later date?

"At its core, it is about getting likes," said Satnam Narang, Senior Security Response Manager at Symantec, an expert in malware and spam. "Since Instagram users can also see what their friends are liking, the posts may show up in those parts of their feeds. Asking users to comment will improve the engagement factor with the hope of adding new followers."

Motherboard tech editor Nicholas Deleon's Instagram Explore tab is filled with corgis and mixed martial artists. Image: Nicholas Deleon

Narang’s belief is that the end goal for these accounts is to be featured on Instagram’s Explore tab. Accounts posting similar—or the exact same—images will comment on and like each others pictures, creating a "network effect" where those with a larger following help the smaller ones to grow.

He also noted that he’d encountered similar spam before: "We’ve certainly seen posts asking users to 'double tap for X,' but this variation takes it a step further by trying to convince the user that adding a comment will reveal something to them. As you can guess, there is no "magic" that appears in the images after a user double taps, although there will be users who follow these instructions expecting it."

It’s interesting how much of this apparently homegrown material emulates–and often outdoes–mainstream marketing. The "call to action" is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book, as is the color red, shown in research to draw attention and inspire impulsivity.

"Double tap and comment 'fall' to see magic. Image: xo_art_less/Instagram

Instagram has had something of a problem with spam in recent years, enough to prompt declarations that "the future of Instagram is spam." The site is riddled with 'adult dating' lures, image theft and links to customer survey 'quizzes' where the only reward is identity theft. This spam preys on vanity, sexual frustration and the need for cash, distilling the world into fundamental appetites. Often spam accounts don’t even have pictures; only an instruction to "GET 100 FOLLOWERS OR MORE."

The red circle pictures also play on how Instagram has legitimized spam as a kind of human behavior, especially among teenage users. Single-word comments like "row" and "first," and the implicit promise of like-for-like, followback-for-follow rule supreme on the network, human-fuelled rather than due to robots. In this landscape, above-board marketers walk an uneasy path: where is the border between marketing and spam, when all interaction here is vaguely spammy?

The thirst is real in the hunt for Instagram likes. Image: Get Likes on Instagram/iOS App Store

It’s also funny how spam became an aesthetic, however unintentionally, over the years, one borne out by many of these pictures. They’re seedy and slapdash, like other unlikely spam memes which prevail today. On YouTube comments a "copypasta" chain letter still does the rounds promising a free iPad under your pillow (no, really). On forums we’ve all been "visited" by the "spooky skeleton," while on Twitter it’s never long before you’re approached by a sexy, barely believable female avatar promising you followers by following her.

The spam underground is ragged place, where progress remains unevenly distributed. Sophisticated malware attacks might have a high success rate, but who’s to say Instagram clickbait won’t work too? Chaos is a ladder, as they say, and the lowest rungs are crowded up with weird and wonderful failspam.

from What's Tap Magic, and Why It’s Taking Over Instagram

Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline

2016 was the year of "post fact" news, but it was also the year of post-new news. 2016 was the year of the algorithmic timeline, in which tech companies dismantled the concept of time entirely.

This year saw Facebook, Twitter and Instagram occupy the role of mainstream media publishers, whether or not they chose to admit it. Each platform instituted similar changes: their "timeline" would no longer display the most recent story at the top, but would use algorithms to decide on what individual users most wanted to see. Depending on our friendships and actions, the system might deliver old news, biased news, or news which had already been disproven. In many cases what we saw was speculation and rumor; stories which weren’t really news at all.

A (chronological) timeline of these changes would include:

• Facebook’s News Feed has never been a straightforward chronological record of events—in the 12 years since its launch, the company has redesigned and refined it in a bid to balance posts from friends, family, advertisers and media outlets. Early in 2016 Facebook announced several further updates to the feed, including measures against clickbait and prioritization of content featuring "friends, family or other core values," content which, it guessed, you’re more likely to interact with.
• In March, Twitter launched its algorithmic timeline, a radical break with the site’s role in delivering real-time information (users were given the chance to opt out if they preferred).
• Finally in June Instagram announced their algorithmic timeline. Rather than displaying a pictures in backwards chronological order, the feed would show pictures it guessed you’re most interested in at the top.

Not long ago social media was lauded for granting access to information, building connections and “making the world more open and connected.” But now machines pre-empt our impulses, herding us into habits and repetition.

2016 was the year of politicians telling us what we should believe, but it was also the year of machines telling us what we should want.

*

In the world of Instagram, some things will always be current: organic breakfasts, taut "bikini bodies" and tiny adorable dogs among them. But even with a prolific following and a popular niche, creators are at the mercy of Instagram’s rules.

I spoke to several well-known Instagram creators, drawing on Motherboard’s ties to the Instagram corgi underworld. “Followers have drastically declined,” Jeri Yoshizu told me in an email, the anonymous custodian of the wildly popular Three Corgis account, which has 146,000 Instagram followers. “We used to get 1,000 a week, now it's half that.” Keeping up with changes is a full-time job: “They've done a good job of getting rid of crazy spammers, but it does come with a price of lower engagement.”

Khoa Phan is "corgdad" to Lilo (31,500 followers). He said he has experienced similar issues: “I think my posts are a bit buried among all of the other photos. People either have to get notified that I’ve posted a new photo, or they have to go to the profile directly. I used to have a regular time when I would post my photos. Now that Instagram doesn’t display photos chronologically, that approach seems pointless.” The only way to insure your posts gain notice is to bombard the feed and hope that some stick, which risks comprising on quality and annoying people.

Varsha Sreekumar looks after Elvis Pawsley, a dog with "short legs" and "big dreams." She saw the changes as contradictory to Instagram’s "insta" nature, driving users to like content only if they know they’ll want more of the same in future. “I enjoyed the freedom of engaging with a piece of content without any sort of ripple effect. It really limits the discovery and exploration potential of the app.”

Sreekumar added: “Interestingly enough, the change was made after Instagram opened the doors to brands to run ads.” But even once they pay for visibility, a brand under pressure to remain engaging: “Playing devil’s advocate for a second here: All the money in the world cannot transform shitty content into good content.”

What happens when users realize they’re trapped in a loop? By then, will automated "good taste" be more sophisticated?

*

There is a bizarre hubris to altering time, as if a person—or company—believes they are greater than physics.

The mark of the despot is to rewrite the clock and calendar: in 2002 Turkmenistan renamed the months according to the will of Saparmurat Niyazov, its "President for Life" (January was named for the leader himself, April was named after his mother). Last year North Korea reverted to "Pyongyang Time," pushing clocks forward by thirty minutes in defiance of Japan. Finally, there are those who reinvent time as a commercial venture: Swatch decision in 1999 to launch a decimalized, centralized unit of time they called the ".beat." intended to serve as a universal "internet time," or chronological Esperanto.

Today these examples are regarded as laughable. But social media’s "New Time" is more tenacious, because it is less obviously a break with normality. It disorients the reader, and distracts them with endless, timeless content. Today sites do not even hide their filter bubble effect: Instagram’s announcement of it’s newly atemporal feed, titled "See the Moments You Care About First," was a masterpiece of presumptive thinking. Apparently we "care," on an emotional level, about the app. Apparently we trust it to select what we see.

It makes sense that social media sites would want you to forget linear time, because the more time you spend on these sites, the more you are worth to them (in this way social media is like a casino, where they change your money "chips" to keep you from noticing when you lose it). Time is flattened into a slideshow, a sentimental carousel.

This moves us into a different sense of time, an achronological "lame infinity." A place where the present is filtered to look old while the old renews itself constantly. Where rumors are powerful than news because they keep coming back until they’re disproven.

Speaking to me by email, Carl Miller, Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (part of cross-party British think tank Demos), highlighted the power of these algorithms as gatekeepers of—and even replacements for—traditional media: “The Facebook news algorithm is more powerful than any newspaper editor in the world. It may become more powerful than every newspaper editor in the world.” Capable of spreading lies just as quickly as they spread knowledge, can algorithms really be trusted with forming the worldview of social media users? Miller warned, “The concern is that they can't resign, and don't play by professional standards; we don't even really know—as outsiders —how they work.”

Where does this leave us, creators and consumers alike, gazing headlong into 2017? Perhaps soon we will get used to the algorithmic timeline, and stop expecting our news to be current. Perhaps soon we’ll stop looking to consume news at all and happily continue, trapped in Throwback Thursday for the rest of (nonlinear) time.

from Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline

‘Spezgiving’: How Reddit’s CEO Tried And Failed to Troll the Trolls

Image: Eva Blue / Flickr

Opening with the acronym for the phrase "Today I Fucked Up," what follows is an apology written by Reddit’s co-founder and current CEO, Steve Huffman.

Posting to the "Announcements" subreddit, Huffman explained that he interfered with posts made eight days ago on /r/The_Donald, the community dedicated to Donald Trump. Attacked by trolls tagging him by his username, "spez," he replaced his name in posts with "/r/The_Donald mods," directing a torrent of insults their way.

Huffman’s attempt to "troll the trolls" didn’t go very well: after cries of censorship and bad practice, he switched the names back within an hour and issued the apology, adding: "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again."

However, a bitter resentment remained. "Spezgiving," the name assigned to the incident, did not come out of nowhere: Huffman cited /r/pizzagate as one of the reasons he’d had "a long week," referring to a conspiracy theory subreddit, originating in /r/The_Donald, which linked the Clintons to an apparent pedophile ring run from a Washington, DC-area pizza shop. (The accusations are significantly more labyrinthine than this, involving Bill Clinton, a private jet, and use of the word "pizza" as a codeword.)

The conspiracy gripped Reddit users then mysteriously died down. Soon after, moderators of /r/The_Donald were criticized when they admitted that the Pizzagate subreddit had been censored along with posts about the rumored disappearance of Wikileaks' Julian Assange. The mods justified this by saying that these topics, often planted by "shills and trolls," derail the subreddit and sew discontent within the community:

This strain of trolls have successfully created a narrative or idea that we are censoring these topics... we also have to consider that The_donald is not about these things, and while they will always have a home here, we cannot allow them to dominate our sub.

Pizzagate was consequently shut down (it continues on Voat, an alternative news aggregation site favored by censored Reddit communities). It seemed, for a time, that Trump’s supporters had successfully drained their own swamp.

But as with all conspiracy theories, the more they are suppressed, the more they take root and multiply. Faith in Reddit had been lost, and Huffman added insult to injury in his follow-up post: he promised not to ban /r/The_Donald outright, but would keep tabs on its most "toxic" users and issue bans on an individual basis. In addition, "stickied" posts at to the top of /r/The_Donald will no longer appear on the site’s /r/all listing, a popular roundup of the news.

What does it mean that Reddit openly intervened, and acted against Trump supporters? In recent weeks Facebook has announced its plan to investigate fake news sources, and Twitter has introduced the option to filter out trolls. Should Reddit, too, move to protect some of its users at a cost to what others call "free speech"?

On Reddit at least, Trump supporters come from a place of permanent aggrievement. They are the persecuted patriarchy; slandered and maligned, they wage a noble war with their shitposting. Was this a political intervention against them, or just a social media platform policing their own ground?

Few would debate the role of social media in this year’s election. Research published by Pew in early November indicated that 20 percent of social media users have changed their stance on political issues due to online content, mainly consumed via social media. Currently the seventh-most popular website in the United States, Reddit is now recognized by politicians as as a barometer, and a communication tool.

Trump’s own use of social media has already spawned a library of thinkpieces–aside from his Twitter rants, he hosted an AMA on Reddit in the run-up to the election, and Brad Parschale, Digital Director for the Trump campaign, even tweeted that he visits /r/the_Donald daily. With over 314,000 subscribers, r/The_Donald prides itself as the unofficial online home of the Trump campaign, and now the Trump presidency. It’s where Trump fans go to self-congratulate, to rally against journalists, and to hatch plans to bombard the New York Times’s offices with bags of salt.

It might appear one of the last old-fashioned, free speech-friendly forums, complete with pseudonyms and user-nominated mods, but Huffman himself wrote in a post a year ago that “Neither [fellow co-founder]Alexis (Ohanian) nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech.” The site does not pretend to allow uncensored posting—in the same post, Huffman alluded to a future where Reddit would be moderated more closely. “We haven’t had the tools to enforce policy, but now we’re building those tools and reevaluating our policy.”

Reddit is a mainstream site composed of niches; its primarily caters to the mainstream, which is why I find it hard to sympathize with the /r/The_Donald’s users. Their smugness far outstrips anything attributed to liberals: they applaud their own heroism in the ongoing "Meme War," complaining of marginalization even as their candidate enters the White House.

And persecution suits the hatemonger well; taking up where Gamergate left off, /r/The_Donald are now promoting the hashtag "#equalrightsonreddit" (it hasn’t exactly trended so far). They feature hilariously dismal, hypocritical use of civil rights quotes– “We as a community shall overcome!”, along with smarmy, inevitable quoting of Niemöller’s "First, they came for them..."

Though they might like to believe otherwise, users of /r/The_Donald are not the underdog. They never were. For now, it’s worth asking if this is as much of a big deal as /r/The_Donald are making it, and whether this counts as censorship at all. Nobody will be kept from accessing the /r/The_Donald. It just won’t be as visible, anymore, to casual users.

Think of it as a wall. A big, beautiful wall, built right around /r/The_Donald’s community.

from ‘Spezgiving’: How Reddit’s CEO Tried And Failed to Troll the Trolls