The photo-sharing platform Instagram announced today, Tuesday, that users can follow hashtags in order to see the most important posts, stories and videos posted on a specific topic within the news feed, along with following up on individual accounts, public figures and companies.
The platform owned by Facebook and has more than 800 million monthly active users began testing this feature about a month ago, and today it announces its access to all users.
Follow hashtags is a new way to discover new users who regularly post useful content for others, and the feature is useful when you want to get more information about a specific topic without wanting to follow other individual users and see everything they post.
Instagram said in a post on its blog, “Today we offer you the ability to follow hashtags, which provides new ways to discover images, videos and people on the platform.” Users can unsubscribe from following a tag at any time, and through the new update it is also possible to follow hashtags that other people follow in Their profile pages.
The platform indicated that the algorithm used allows displaying the most popular posts within the hashtag, so that not all posts related to the tag will appear in the news feed.
Instagram added that following a tag is not different from following any other friend, as after searching for the tag, a follow button will appear on its page, then photos, videos and stories will start to appear among the friends' posts within the user's news feed.
The platform talked about its use of automated and manual systems to identify inappropriate posts and remove unwanted content, as hundreds of people on the community operations team monitor user reports and the platform's mechanism to review content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Instagram confirmed that it follows the same rules as regular accounts with regard to user privacy, as posts linked to certain hashtags within private accounts will only appear to followers.
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