Many big companies have made adjustments on how they work due to the impact of COVID-19, and Instagram joins in this as well. They’ve announced that they are trying to push some updates that can help people during this crisis time.
Information is key in this time of crisis. Instagram decided to use their platform to be helpful in this manner so that people can stay informed, connected, and safe in the comfort of their homes.
From this effort came some new updates like:
- Showing better educational content on their Instagram Search option
- Adding some new stickers
- Removing all of the COVID-19 accounts from recommendations unless they are posted by verified sources
- Putting out a new donation sticker in more countries and giving more information about a nonprofit organization that people can support
- Using their new “Stay Home” sticker, so people can create a shared story
- And finally, they made a new way to browse Instagram over video chat with other users
If you try to search for anything related to coronavirus on Instagram, you will now see a new educational message. Those messages are related to all of the resources from the World Health Organization and local health ministries. This is not yet implemented for all of the countries, but Instagram is working hard to enable it globally over the next few weeks.
They also made an effort on making new stickers that remind people to wash their hands or other related coronavirus advice. These feature is coming in the next few days.
Is it a little too late?
We must point out some negative points here. These updates are perhaps a little too late, especially on showing better education content on the search bar. So far, Instagram let out a lot of misinformation running freely on the app. For instance, if you went to #5G feed, you could a lot of unconfirmed information that lead to even more misinformation.
Similarly, its not all related to COVID-19. There is a lot of false information about other subjects too, and Instagram seemed to not care or can’t prevent their spread so far.
Maybe the biggest update is the new media sharing feature. It allows users to make a group video chat and look at Instagram posts together. This is a cool feature and it will boost the popularity of even now popular Instagram.
So far we saw some good and bad points for Instagram right now. We hope that they can stop all of the bad pieces of information on their app. This new update is a good way forward for sure.
Photo credit: The images used are owned by Instagram and have been provided for press usage.
