Since Instagram has been predominantly a mobile app, its main advantage has not been that it drives a lot of traffic to other sites. So unlike for example Pinterest, it has been relatively free from spam until now. But the last few weeks, we have seen a major push from spammers that use hashtags to find images to publish spam comments on.
At the moment, I can easily scroll through the photos in my feed and find several spam comments, most seem to be on images that use hashtags. This is what happened in the comments to my latest photo, within a few minutes of posting the hashtags (one has since been deleted):
Comments like these are very easy to find. Here are some more posted on some of my friends’ images and on mine:
It is not very hard to determine that these accounts are completely fake. Many of them have fake followers with names like these:
Others have some 14,000 followers that when you click on them, simply don’t exist.
Users can delete and spam report comments and accounts, but some spammers are so active that there is a need for general spam filters that could automatically filter out comments about sites like “followsta gram” and “ig fame”. Spam is annoying for users and need to be taken care of. After all, there are many of us that love Instagram. Don’t let the spammers spoil our instafun.