How IG became a hotspot for misinformation

Instagram is poised to be one of the worst breeding grounds for political fake news ahead of the 2020 election, and hardly anyone is paying attention.

The Facebook-owned platform has largely escaped the leery eye cast upon its parent company and Twitter, which have taken most of the blame for housing foreign disinformation campaigns in 2016. But Instagram was “perhaps the most effective platform” that the Internet Research Agency — Russia’s Kremlin-linked troll farm — used to target voters in the last election, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And as one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, Instagram has around 1 billion active users (more than three times as many as Twitter) and is a go-to source for political news among Gen Zers — most of whom will be old enough to vote next year.