Instagram reels was briefly flooded with graphic content including overdoses, animal attacks and people dying last night after a suspected glitch.
Users were made aware of the system malfunction from various sources including TikTok and Facebook groups as they were warned not to look at their reels.
Assuming that other users’ algorithms weren’t working properly, users were confronted with the same images upon logging into reels.
“Personally what I have seen is people landing the wrong way and their bones breaking backwards, people dying from overdoses. It’s something else,” one person said.
“People have kids on Instagram and if they see stuff like that, it could be really traumatising.”
Instagram quickly apologised, saying they had fixed the error causing the graphic videos to be shown on the Instagram Reels.
“We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended,” a spokesman said.
According to Meta’s transparency report, the organisation removed more than 10 million pieces of violent and graphic content from Instagram in the July to September period last year.
Nearly 99% of that content was proactively found and taken down by Meta before users reported it.
Photo Credit: Business Insider
