Instagram and TikTok are using your content to sell junk

At the end of February, Puck reported a strange case: an influencer with over a million followers was inadvertently promoting products on Instagram. On some of Julia Berolzheimer’s posts, a “Buy the Look” button was floating in the corner. When subscribers clicked on it, they received items similar to those Berolzheimer wore.

Her job is to promote clothing, accessories, and other products to her followers. So it’s not strange to have links to specific articles. What was It’s strange that she didn’t put the links there herself: Instagram added them without her consent. Product links led subscribers not to the actual items Berolzheimer was promoting (and for which he earned a commission), but to look-alikes.

“My followers were being shown cheap knockoffs and random items from brands I’d never heard of, attached to my image, under my name,” Berolzheimer wrote on Substack. She said she had no idea the “Shop the Look” button was appearing on her posts until someone else informed her.

“This is a limited test intended to help people explore products that match their interests when viewing posts or reels,” Meta spokesperson Matthew T Torres said in an email. “We are exploring various changes as we continue to test this experience and gather feedback, including exploring different labels. Meta does not take a commission on these items and we will continue to refine the experience based on feedback.”

Although Meta claims to be simply testing the feature, the ramifications are obvious. From a business perspective, it’s detrimental to influencers if their name, face, and content are associated with promoting products they haven’t endorsed: Followers buy things their favorite creators recommend because they trust their judgment and taste. It also has the potential to disrupt an influencer’s revenue stream: suddenly, instead of Berolzheimer earning a commission through his own affiliate links, another platform steps in.

But this feature and others like it aren’t just a problem for people like Berolzheimer: All of us non-influencers are vulnerable to becoming unwitting fodder for ads. Maybe this has already happened to you.

We view social commerce first as the playground of influencers, with their affiliate links, #partner content, and midroll ads. But these days, anything can be spoofed to promote products – and for many social media users, their feed has essentially become just a shopping recommendation engine.

In September, I reported that TikTok was testing a new feature very similar to the one Instagram is currently being criticized for. The TikTok version worked much the same way: if a viewer paused a video, a “Find Similar” button automatically appeared. TikTok uses AI to analyze content and then recommends products to sell on TikTok Shop that look like what was in the original video. He used strangers’ sunglasses to recommend cheap lookalikes to me; a video of Ms. Rachel served to nudge me towards similar dresses. Even more worrying, I discovered that this feature was being applied to videos originating from Gaza, effectively turning Palestinian massacres into TikTok Shop promotions. Users had no idea the links were being added to their videos, and the unsubscribe option was buried deep in the settings menu.

At the time, TikTok said it was working to fix the issue – but the feature appears to be here to stay. Last week, while scrolling the platform, the same “Search Similar” button appeared on a clothing video. The account had just over 400 followers.

The conventional wisdom is that brands hire influencers to access their sprawling audiences, with whom content creators have established a relationship of trust. But gradually, the role of an influencer in some cases resembles a gig job: micro- and nano-influencers with a small number of subscribers hustle as a side job. Increasingly, marketers are leveraging regular, non-influencer types to create content that feels organic and raw. An entire subgenre of advertising, called UGC (user-generated content), hires content creators not for their subscribers but for the work of producing videos or photos. On-demand work platforms like Fiverr are flooded with offers to create UGC, with some rates starting as low as $20. And then there are, of course, the downright bizarre isolated cases, like when Internet culture journalist Kate Lindsay recently wrote that she discovered a photo of her and her husband was being used to sell picture frames.

In its early days, the burgeoning creator economy promised something it ultimately couldn’t deliver: that anyone, anywhere would have a chance at fame, money, and influence. In reality, it took a huge amount of luck and privilege to succeed – but slot machine-style recommendation algorithms have turned that on its head. The explosion in the number of influencers from 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic has opened a Pandora’s box for contemporary advertising and marketing, and there is an endless supply of manpower to fill any camera, facial cleanser or gaming app to promote. Instagram’s “Shop the Look” or TikTok’s “Find Similar Products” programs are a sign that the central tenet of the creator economy has come true, albeit in circumstances similar to those of Monkey’s Paw: everyone is an influencer, whether we like it or not.