Instagram is destroying Society but Instagram used to be a great site it was founded by a man who rejected employment in three of the biggest Tech firms Twitter Facebook and Google because instead the founder wants to make a positive change on the internet his app's algorithms and ads would be hand selected by him and only his tiny team which is why Instagram rejected data harvesting they rejected the toxic aspects of social media to create something healthy something that would revolutionize photo sharing and photography by doing this Instagram amassed 10 million users in just 10 months of its launch but then something changed Instagram turned into everything it sought to destroy becoming widely regarded as the worst social media site for our mental health with 400 million Instagram users now feeling unattractive leading to the term Instagram reality going mainstream and of course this has resulted in skyrocketing levels of depression anxiety and eating disorders with Instagram even admitting that the app is quote harmful for a sizable percentage of teens all of this and yet Instagram is now planning to release a version of the app for children under the age of 13. so what's behind the change in the app what made Instagram so toxic well once you understand how Zuckerberg manipulated Instagram and his co-founders for personal gain you start to understand the bigger picture of what Instagram really means for Facebook's future and what this means for us and trust me in the next five years it's gonna get bad but to understand why we need to go back to where it all started Kevin and Mike were similarly normal kids with an affinity for coding although letter was public about Mike's early life Kevin on the other hand was particularly destined to work in Tech his parents were both from a corporate Tech background and Kevin spent much of his childhood gaming and designing his own levels this early interest led him to study management science in engineering at Stanford and it was at Stanford that Kevin's system would meet his fellow co-founder Mike kriger during his studies Kevin was exceptional being accepted into the highly selective Mayfield fellows program where he would take part in an internship program at startup companies one of these dark side companies he would work at was called audio later known as Twitter however Kevin's sister would only leave after a few months but not until he made essential connections with Twitter's Founders it was these sorts of Newfound Connections in Silicon Valley that also meant he would cross paths with Mark Zuckerberg he was actually offered a job at Facebook but declined the offer to instead study Photography in Italy which to make clear meant that Kevin Systrom had narrowly avoided jobs at two of the biggest tech companies he had no idea on the missed potential and instead of making billions he would cash his chips in on studying photography instead something that would actually surprisingly pay dividends later on and over the next few years Kevin would work for a few different tech companies he even spent some time working at Google but his passion still lame building something of his own to many it would seem like Kevin had missed the boat turning down three separate dream jobs we're talking about 2006 the time that Facebook Twitter Google were all just blowing up and yet Kevin missed all of these opportunities but what he would do next would more than make up for this and so following his passion system would want to compete with all these companies he worked at but his first four-way into entrepreneurship wasn't really a success by any means his first business would be simple Kevin would reconnect with a Stanford friend Mike who was a professional software engineer the two would then work together to build an app called bourbon bourbon was a sort of check-in app where users can post updates on where they had been and attached pictures but this was more Kevin's hobby this wasn't solving any problems the market didn't need it they didn't want it and so the app failed to gain any traction forward to Kevin's dismay because at the same time he was watching Facebook Twitter Google all rapidly take off and he was left with nothing and So after talking to some users the co-founders would discover that people didn't really care about the check-in features or most of the other features of the App instead people only exclusively use the photo showing part of the app however because of the way that Mike and Kevin had built the app and its design investors were still impressed with investors actually pouring up to 500 000 into the app 25 000 of which coming from Kevin's former boss Jack Dorsey but even with this cash injection bourbon was destined to be dead in the water an app with 500 000 backing only had 100 users with most of the users only preferring the photo sharing technology anyway Kevin was faced with a crisis what was next for the company if this failed he would lose all his reputation and the connections that came with it he would be an embarrassment all the opportunities he missed for this the Founders were now faced with a very hard Choice should they preserve their current idea or throw it all away and start again from scratch considering the fact that pretty much no one's had a bourbon it should be obvious what really went down but on this next venture they would learn from their mistakes instead of trying to find a use for the current technology itself they would instead find a problem that needed to be solved first and so the Pair worked on what bourbon did best the mobile photo sharing at the time the current way that people were showing photos online was just full of problems the main one being that uploading a photo would just take ages and so the founders would solve this problem by beginning the process much earlier than other apps instead of starting the upload process as the last step Instagram would instead start uploading the photo much sooner which would lead to much quicker upload times however the biggest problem they would solve was that mobile pictures just didn't look very good so the founders would come up with multiple solutions for this first they Strang the photos down to a much smaller Square resolution making photos look good on any phone meaning photos on Instagram just seemed way more focused this even helped with the upload problem smaller photos meant smaller files which meant quicker uploads however Kevin and Mike's other solution for the poor quality problem was their most ingenious yet they would build photos into the new app letting anyone give their photos a professional touch and after eight weeks of all this hard work the app was ready for release in 2010. the only thing they needed now was a new name and they decided on Instagram within days of Instagram's release it was immediately clear that all their Innovation had paid off Instagram was a smash hit people absolutely loved it on December 12 2010 Instagram had gained 1 million active users just two months after its release and of course this crazy growth was then supplemented by even bigger Investments the company raised seven million dollars in funding in early 2011 with this funding coming from a wide variety of people some came from Venture Capital firms like Benchmark capital and others with the Instagram Founders connections from Silicon Valley with Jack Dorsey being a notable investor this whole deal would eventually value Instagram at about 25 million dollars not bad considering it was only released about half a year ago but this amount was pennies compared to what Instagram would become now that Instagram had established itself and was gaining thousands of users every day heads the sun to turn Kevin and Mike were quoting offers from numerous companies to buy Instagram and the day-to-day work didn't pause for these deals either Instagram required constant attention especially because the founders didn't want to use an algorithm out of fear that it would be exploited instead Instagram's small team of 12 would have to manually choose which photos were promoted on the platform whilst this was a stressful task it ensured a certain level of quality on Instagram's homepage and this hard work was paying off for Instagram massively it seemed like the app had just unlimited potential firstly the app had massive growth numbers in June of 2011 around 8 months after its launch Instagram had amassed 5 million users which were going to be 10 million just two months after Instagram's growth was then further boosted by endorsements from some massive names Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande were early adopters and they would bring their millions of fans to the platform because of this Instagram was becoming the king of Silicon Valley Instagram was now posing a major long-term threat to the Giants of big Tech namely Twitter and Facebook which is why it did seem likely that Twitter would buy Instagram considering Jack dorsey's personal connections with the founders along with substantial investments in the company which is what made it all the more surprising when Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars in early April of 2012.
but why did the founders choose Facebook over all the other suitors well it's all down to the deal they got the most important part of the deal was that Instagram would stay largely independent for Facebook despite becoming a subsidiary Facebook would also give Instagram large amounts of funding and would help them grow their business system and Kroger would also stay a CEO and CTO respectively enabling the company to be inhibited in this growth on top of this the power would make hundreds of millions from the deal they would never need to work another day in their lives sister Malone is estimated to have made a cool 400 million dollars in cash and early on Facebook were good with their promises numerous new features were quickly added to the app like video sharing and photo tagging as both of these Concepts were already in Facebook's interface and would likely fund it through the deal however all of this didn't come without a big cost at the time of the deal there weren't really any concerns about Facebook getting a monopoly but Instagram and Facebook have an incredibly similar platform this couple with the immense growth of Instagram should have raised at least a few alarms I mean Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey could see the real threat Instagram is posing to the social media space however The Regulators somehow approved the acquisition without a second thought legal battles are still raging to the stair by whether Facebook has a monopoly on social media and we haven't even mentioned Facebook's ownership of WhatsApp and let's learn the concept of the metaverse regardless we'll get to these problems later in the video but in the years after the acquisition in 2012 Instagram's growth would only continue to soar hitting 50 million users in just three weeks after the acquisition which would then rise to 100 million less than a year after that but with this huge growth was also huge controversies that with my Instagram's reputation first under Facebook Instagram would update its times of service letting itself sell used as photos without paying the user or even telling them about it which meant that Instagram now owned the millions of photos uploaded every day and this was the first of the many Sinister changes that came from Facebook's acquisition but at one issue had nothing to do with Facebook and that was crime on Instagram just a year after Instagram's release the platform is inundated with self-advertising drug dealers as stupid as it sounds to broadcast your crimes on the internet the lack of oversight from Instagram made being caught very unlikely image recognition technology was still very primitive and Instagram had too few employees to monitor all of its millions of posts in fact back in those early years there were only 13 employees running the entire site this meant that the founders were almost powerless to stop the wave of crime on their own platform they did try some half measures like Banning the hashtags related to drugs and drug dealing however these bands were easily circumvented the criminals just made new hashtags instead another problem that the founders were facing was that these criminals posts would often pop up and use as recommended fees and as these drug posts were often targeted towards teens young people's Feats were always the worst affected when asked about this in 2013 an Instagram spoke past stated that quote people can't buy things on Instagram we are simply a place where people share photos and videos and because of this attitude nothing's changed the consequences of this were then documented in a vice documentary from 2021 which detailed how money launderers fish for victims through Instagram with post advertising fast and easy money once desperate people take the criminals money they are often manipulated into riskier and risky skin which often results in the victims going to prison or Worse being caught by other criminals because when the banks do catch on and freeze the money the victims often end up owing thousands to organize criminal groups there's been a flurry of Articles written just this year describing how easy it is to find these schemes the Watchdog Tech transparency group reports that drug hashtags are recommended to users as young as 13 years old in testing they found that one new Teen account they made only needed two Taps to find an account advertising Xanax and Fentanyl although this is a long-term problem that's affected Instagram since its Inception but these sorts of problems would never stop its growth and after the Facebook deal was closed Instagram did seem to be in safe hands which was true at first Instagram had near full autonomy to develop into a social media giant with the founders being free to do as they want with the platform however this of course wouldn't be the case forever you see Kevin's system had earlier stated in 2012 that there weren't any plans to turn photos into ads but then just one year later Facebook had four sponsored posts onto the platform this then came with a plethora of other Advertiser friendly changes like letting advertise see analytics on their posts now the founders never really wanted to spam their site without but Facebook did Facebook needed to make Instagram profitable which on the surface would sound reasonable but eventually this would have died of consequences for the platform consequences that were bubbling under the surface but on the surface everything did seem to be going great Instagram was becoming profitable and by the summer of 2016 Instagram had amassed 500 million users however inside the company was a conflict Brewing as this huge influx of users was both a blessing and a curse for the founders whilst it must have felt amazing to see the product you worked so hard on become a worldwide phenomenon this newfound size would also bring its own new problems because Instagram was getting dangerously close to outshunning Facebook Instagram was actually getting to a point that it was threatening Mark Zuckerberg's baby which is why other social media integration was then Stripped Away from Instagram with solely Facebook being promoted instead and in the following years Facebook will continue to undermine Instagram's independence with Zuckerberg forcing the founders to put more advertising on the platform even though this was something the founders completely disagreed with because until now now Instagram had only allowed specific Brands to advertise on the platform this highly created choice of adverts was user friendly and in keeping with Instagram's brand however Facebook's system was much more profitable which allowed the highest bidder to place whatever ads they wanted on the website which would inevitably lead to lots of ugly flashy adverts that would plague the platform not to mention compromising Facebook's algorithms for the founders this was unacceptable it completely conflicted with Instagram's focus on minimalism and quality and this was just one of the many problems that were now bubbling away underneath the surface Civil War was brewing a quick word from our sponsor honey gain passive income might sound too good to be true but this isn't the case with today's sponsor honey game honey game is a magical app that makes you money just for keeping it running in the background but how does honeygame work well all you need to do is install honey gain on your device and run the app that's it you're making money by simply sharing your internet connection and to be clear the app doesn't collect any personal data instead it uses the internet to gather bits of information from the web such as who's offering the best prices or where fake goods are being sold online your internet connection is then used by businesses that need to gather public web data such as pricing information because for example best deal sites need to compare prices from different regions and that's where honey game comes in honeygain is like the Google of 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honest ways photoshopping was and still is everywhere on the platform in fact it's become so widespread through the term Instagram reality is very widely used nowadays there's even a subreddit dedicated to exposing it it's going by the same name and it has over 1 million subscribers and you see it isn't just photoshopping though Instagram is full of people presenting a false idyllic life and if these tricks don't catapult you to Instagram fame you can even buy a fake audience as most of us know by now it's incredibly easy to buy bot accounts as followers even celebrities do it it's estimated that Ariana Grande has over 65 million fake followers all of these deceptions are aggregating into a massively unrealistic standard on Instagram and the sad fact is that it doesn't really matter anymore that people are catching on to this even when you use the app and you understand that it's fake it's still massively affects your mindset and your mental health if you're one of Instagram's 500 million regular users then you'll always be bombarded with unattainable standards every single day which leads to you subconsciously comparing your life to other people's perfect fake manufactured lives although this doesn't affect every single person in the exact same way it is a proven effect out of the five major social media sites that young people use Instagram is always rated as the worst for users mental health all of this due to Instagram's toxic culture of perfectionism and what makes this so much more disturbing though is that Facebook has been intentionally ignoring these problems both on Instagram and on Facebook itself for example in late 2021 an internal presentation for Instagram and Facebook employees was leaked the contents of this presentation and its implications were shocking the presentation doesn't just show that Instagram is harmful to young people but also that Facebook has done detailed research on its effects one of the most damning statements it makes is quotes Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of teens particularly teenage girls this was then backed up by graphs and figures which show just how deep and goes forty percent of teens found that Instagram made them feel unattractive and nearly 30 percent of UK teens said that Instagram made them feel inadequate the presentation also stated that teens know the awful effects that Instagram has but felt compelled to use it anyway all because of Facebook's Advanced addictive algorithms trapping its users in a vicious cycle where you end up searching for the next dopamine hurts where you start to feel left out and inadequate only then to keep chasing the dopamine to get rid of this pain chasing to see that you're not missing out today that you might finally be doing better than others and just like that you're trapped in a virtual hamster wheel and you didn't even realize it it's all programmed by Facebook's Advanced algorithms and the best part is this is affecting all of us and what's even sicker is that this doesn't even bring enough profit for Facebook no they need to exploit even more of the population they need to exploit the most vulnerable which is why Facebook has been getting ready to release a version of Instagram for children under 13. this Sinister move was only delayed by the leak of this presentation otherwise it would have probably been released even though Facebook does know that Instagram is very unsafe for teenagers Facebook knows that social media is the new smoking which is why this move clearly shows that Facebook doesn't care one bit about its users they only pause the release of the kids app because of the backlash and once that dies down I'm sure we'll see Instagram kids released soon after soon enough even your toddlers will be on Instagram if they're not already addicted to Tech talk it was Facebook's aggressive money over everything pushed for more control that finally broke the two Instagram co-founders the straw that eventually broke the camel's back was Facebook's stifling of Instagram's growth because to Facebook it was becoming very clear that Instagram is poised to overtake Facebook in pretty much every metric zoc's worst fears were coming to life their biggest fears and the reason they bought Instagram was now manifesting which was evidently enough to keep Mark Zuckerberg up at night with jealousy and resentment so Facebook actually made the decision to limit the amount of new employees that Instagram could hire all because they didn't want to hurt zuck's dying baby this would then put a massive damper on the company's growth it simply won't be possible for Instagram to accommodate new users with a small team of Staff which in some ways is actually a good thing but for Instagram's internal team this meant that they were always constantly overworked this and all the other changes that Facebook was doing to the company led to the resignation of both the co-founders it was never publicly stated why Kevin and Mike chose to leave Instagram however League documents showed that Systrom suspected the Zuckerberg was intentionally making his life miserable to try and push him out all because zark Wanted full control of Instagram he didn't want sister in running the company anymore this was his plan all along and so when the pet abruptly left the company it was the final nail in Instagram's Independence their unique version for the company had been the key to a success and whilst their departure left the Instagram team aimless this wouldn't last for very long Facebook and Zuckerberg were quick to consolidate the control of the app it soon became clear that Instagram was to become a mere extension of Facebook as if to rub salt in the wound Instagram was even rebranded into Instagram from Facebook with Facebook's takeover of Instagram completed there would of course be immediate consequences firstly Facebook moved Instagram completely onto the ad model this would then open the floodgates to data collection and data Harvester causing Instagram to be filled to the brim with adverts and these adverts would be fueled on Instagram's new data collection model which leads us on to the second change that Facebook was quick to make and this was to apply their uniquely awful data collection policy to Instagram by doing this it would only take one year after the founders left for Facebook to land in hot water for the treatment of their user data with the whole Scandal culminating in a 5 billion dollar fine and then not long after this a massive data leaker Instagram led to over 49 million users having their info exposed the attack showcased Instagram's completely neglectful treatment of the private data they had been taking from their users the breach contained lots of different types of data contact info profile pictures even locations were leaked and around 1 in 20 Instagram users were said to have been exposed these leads became all too common once Facebook had full control of Instagram being a seemingly inevitable consequence of Facebook's policy of selling user data to third parties but of course Facebook isn't incentivized to change this policy either because data is the core of Facebook it's the one thing that led them to becoming a trillion dollar company and breaches aren't the only problem with Instagram's misuse of data either again in 2019 Instagram was exposed as having breached his terms of service after letting a marketing agency have access to data they said they'd keep private the marketing agency had scraped data from millions of Instagram posts to create a detailed picture of its key demographic again the data included people's biographical and location info where they worked and their interests and what's even scarier is that Facebook is the only company that knows the full extent of their data harvesting and this is why Facebook's growing monopolistic control over social media is a growing problem this is what's so Sinister about Facebook's constant expansion I mean we haven't even spoken about how Facebook is doing the exact same thing with WhatsApp as it did with Instagram and let's keep in mind that by Facebook's constant control it now has three and a half billion users on all its platforms no one has this much Global control this is unprecedented this is something that Emperors and Kings across history have always wanted so how has Facebook game so much control well it's because Facebook addicts its users to the platforms it's addicting Society to their services I mean naturally Facebook wants its users to engage as much as possible with the content on their sites and it turns out that people are mostly engaged with things that spark negative emotions rather than positive ones this means that Facebook is incentivized to promote content that search the vision between people this is why we've become so divided in society all of which was confirmed by ex-facebook employee Francis Horgan however even darker is that Facebook isn't just content with their dominance over social media they're not stopping until they have the whole online World in their grasp this is why Facebook has rebranded to meta and is now so invested in the metaverse with the world moving online at a faster rate every day having control over a whole Digital Universe will extend Facebook's control by an order of magnitude because not only will Facebook control your screen life but Facebook will now have control of your entire life your entire reality and society which is why you can guarantee that Facebook's executives are licking their lips at the thought of further addict in the global population to their services and considering Facebook's hyper fixation on profits it shows that they know that this is the future where everyone's not only looking at their screens but living in an actual Universe run by Facebook controlled by Zuck himself because right now Facebook's controller for people is big but it could soon become effectively unlimited Facebook's plan right now is to extend their control way past anything we've ever seen before and I'm starting to see this creep around when I go on the tube in the London Underground I'm now starting to see ads for the metaphors which is why Instagram may just end up as a stepping stone on the path to Facebook's ever increasing hold on society I have a quick important announcement to make I'm sick of being demonetized on YouTube I'm sick of censoring these videos for the YouTube algorithm so this is gonna change every month I'm going to be releasing unfiltered raw controversial videos for YouTube members videos about the darkest corners of the internet Tick Tock the CIA China Rothschilds and MrRobot series review and by the end of the month stash early August I'll be releasing a video on Ted Kaczynski otherwise known as the Unabomber where we'll talk about his story going from a mathematical Prodigy to living in the wild sending bombs in the mail and having his Manifesto on the front page of the New York Times not only that but by becoming a member of the channel you'll have access to my Discord server to talk with other like-minded people where every month I'll be doing a q a for all your questions and if you're still not happy with your membership in the first month I will personally refund you all you have to do is email me so if you want to watch exclusive unfiltered controversial videos that icon release to the public which includes access to my server and a monthly q a join my channel for only 5.
