Twitter Is Hilariously Shading All The People Who Fell For That IG Privacy Policy Hoax
Instagram Gate 2019 is here, y'all, and it is taking its cues from a hoax that first started circulating the internet back in 2012. If you were scrolling through your feed on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 20, chances are you saw celebrities and fellow users alike re-sharing a message that alleged to protect the poster from Instagram's new "privacy laws." Despite the fact that the text clearly contained copy-and-pasted elements, the font itself changed throughout the message, and it looks straight out of a 1995 Microsoft Word document, quite a few people (including several high-profile celebrities and politicians) fell for the doctored message and shared it on their accounts. Now that it's been debunked, these tweets about the "new" Instagram Privacy Policy show people are scratching their heads at how so many people got swept up into the hoax in the first place.
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Julia Roberts, Debra Messing, Julianne Moore, Rob Lowe, Taraji P. Henson, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Judd Apatow, Scooter Braun, and Adriana Lima were among the many public figures who copy and pasted a post on Instagram that warned that the social media platform's new privacy policy (which was apparently reported by a mystical Channel 13 news station) would allow your own content to be "used in court cases and litigation against you." Yikes.
Posters who shared the message believed that they were telling Instagram that they would not give the company permission to "use my pictures, information, messages, or posts, both past and future." Adding to the incredulity of the whole situation, the original doctored post insisted that the text must be copied and pasted for sharing for it to be "valid." At the time of publication, many of the celebrity posts had been deleted.
If this message looks awfully familiar, it's because versions of it have been circling the internet the past few years on Instagram's parent company, Facebook. While a Snopes fact check confirmed that it was indeed fake back in 2012, Facebook itself was forced to share a message in its help center debunking the hoax after it resurfaced in 2016.
On Wednesday, Aug. 21, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Elite Daily that the latest iteration is no different, saying, "There is no truth to this post."
While quite a few people did fall for the hoax, others — including Trevor Noah and John Mayer — took to Twitter and Instagram to wonder how anyone could have thought it was real with their own doctored versions of the hoax. People were seriously wondering: how could anyone think this is real?
Noah and Mayer took to Instagram to poke fun at the hoax with their own memes that shed light on the ridiculousness of a copy-and-pasted post that looks straight from the AOL-era being a legally binding document.
If you're ever curious about Instagram's changing policies and updates, you'll want to check out the platform's information center for a reliable news source. The latest post, which was shared on July 18, reveals that the tech giant has updated its account disable policy, which now allows the company to remove or suspend accounts that interfere with Instagram's Community Guidelines or Terms of Use. Examples include posting photos of "violating content" or content that's illegal or fradulent.
Now that this hoax has happened once again and we're hopefully all the wiser now, I'd probably try to alert friends and family who've fallen for the hoax and have yet to take down their posts.
