Lately, posts geo-tagged with “Singapore” seemed to go viral on Instagram. No wonder, my explore page was full of pictures with Singapore as their location. Turns out this was a bug, and much to the dismay of people who apparently have benefitted from this, Instagram has fixed it.
The app now prevents the users from tagging them in Singapore in a bid to go viral. Internet stars like Logan Paul, Dan Bilzerian and Amanda Cerny, began tagging their posts with the location, despite not being in the region at all. They observed an increase in likes and followers from random strangers across the world, even though they removed the tag after 12 hours or so, likes and followers remained. They didn’t know how it worked but that it just did.
Then followed the crazy trend of people using the location to garner attention and the increased number of random people all over our respective explore pages. This had caused confusion among their fans thinking their favorite stars are in the city and people expressed their disbelief over the hack on Twitter.
It didn’t take long for Instagram to acknowledge this frenzied location tagging by its users. In a statement, they confessed that a bug in its algorithm “impacted engagement” when posts were tagged in Singapore, giving them a greater chance of being seen by more people. The company that has now fixed the issue has not revealed its cause. It is speculated to be a bug in the geo-tagging algorithm, which instantly got posts tagging Singapore as their location to the app’s explore page making it reach a much vast audience.
Instagram has launched a slew of new features including bookmarks, likable comments, live video, tags, Stories and more in the past few months and recently crossed the 600 million user mark.
