Introduction
With the progression of the technical age, which reached its influence into countless spheres of the current human condition, came the inevitable – the reassessment of each and every sphere. The ethical domain of human perception and relations cannot be excluded from this influence. As with anything that the now-omnipresent technology has touched, ethics were found to be in need of re-evaluation; with the novel ways of connectivity, the question of what can or should be considered ethical or unethical in these conditions arose. The 21st century tech giants became the reigning monarchs with absolute power in the establishment of this new world. As these companies have been coevolving with the Internet, they were – and still are, due to their unique position – free to act as they see fit in this uncharted territory. Due to this, a new understanding of ethics is emerging – particularly in the areas concerning privacy and the rights of an individual in the digital space.
The Dilemma
Such are the set of ethical – or rather, deeply unethical at its core – norms that are going to be addressed in the present study. The case concerns a particular timeframe in the history of Instagram, just several months after Facebook’s acquisition of it. In December of 2012, “Instagram announced new changes to its privacy policy and terms of use”, say Babb & Nelson (2013). In this updated version, it is stated that, by publishing any type of content on the platform, the user grants the company a set of permissions. While it does not claim full ownership of the content, Instagram still has “a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate” it (Terms of Use, 2013). The most important aspect of the updated terms is in the specification of the process of handling user content by Instagram. With the updated version of this legal document, Instagram reserves the right to “place such advertising and promotions on the Instagram Services or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content” (Terms of Use, 2013). The language of these paragraphs, apparently, has been carefully selected and rewritten over the years – especially after the case in discussion.
The company is viable to use people’s content with their third-party partners – mainly advertisers and businesses – meaning that it is still able to handle it a multitude of scenarios. Clearly, these major changes prompted Instagram’s audience to express their immense displeasure with how the platform will be using their personal content. While Instagram’s – or rather, at that time, already Facebook’s – Terms clearly state now that they “do not claim ownership of your content”, it is particularly interesting to explore how both sides define ownership (Terms of Use, 2020). There is a myriad of aspects associated with the idea ranging from an understandable emotional attachment to this, at times, highly intimate and personal content, to strictly legal terms.
The ethical implications of this particular dilemma are specifically appealing for further study for their multi-layered nature and rich ground for a debate on ethics. This crucial decision made by Instagram’s management was, unarguably, made in compliance with Facebook’s business model – as it occurred straight after the company’s acquisition. However, there were ethical questions involved, surely – the company needed to retain balance between gaining profits and keeping their users. According to Woiceshyn (2011), most CEO’s employ the principle of “rational egoism” – a set of values focused on acting out of one’s own interests, but using the principles of justice, honesty, and others responsibly. Although the company has utilized this principle, the quality of conducting this process is debatable – evidence for this would be the user reprehension that the decision received. In this way, it altered performance in a major way –and very quickly, Instagram started losing its users, with some deleting their accounts and daily user activity going down by 42% in one month (Chang, 2013). Thus, this decision to change advertising policy on the platform resulted in a scandal in the media and on the Internet.
Interestingly enough, the incident made Instagram comment on it publicly, but also revert to the 2010’s Terms of Use and adjust some of the wording in the document. The company’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom wrote on Twitter, “our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising” in an attempt to dissipate the “confusing language” (Babb & Nelson, 2013). Despite the fact that general distrust continued to permeate the platform, the company presented impressive statistics for that year: “90 million monthly active users and 40 million photos per day” (Babb & Nelson, 2013). Taking that into account, it is suitable to say that, although the update causing so much negative public resonance, it did not affect neither Instagram’s business model effectiveness, nor Facebook’s decision to purchase it.
Why the People Revolted: Ethical Issues Raised by the Update
The Question of Ownership
One would not be able to find an impressive number of ethical problems that this case raises; however, the ones it is concerned with are of uttermost relevance and importance, especially in the digital age. Those are the issues of privacy – a particularly controversial topic in the recent years, as well as the concept of ownership that this case questions. The place of ad targeting can also be discussed – as to what kind of advertisement can be considered ethical and how far targeting a specific audience can go.
As priorly mentioned, the issue of ownership is central here. In order to understand it in a wholesome manner, one needs to comprehend the differences in perception of this concept by the company – Instagram and Facebook – and its audience, the users. The main reason for this immense perception gap lies in the nature of its main medium – the Internet itself. As stated by Kudina & Verbek (2019), “normative frameworks are not static but coevolve with technologies” – resulting in the approach dubbed “the technomoral change” (p. 295). The principle can be applied to a rapidly-developing or emergent technology, which in itself becomes an ordaining principle and shapes a new reality around itself. However, typically, the technomoral principle can be found to influence majorly what is named a “soft impact” by Kudina & Verbek (2019, p. 295). These entail value formation and personal responsibilities that are altered by newly acquired technological practices.
The technomoral change paradigm is at the root of Instagram’s rule-bending perception and understanding of the modern version of ownership. It asserts that just as the introduction of the worldwide web, and smartphone technology have made a true revolution in global society, then similarly, the “social acceptability” of different concepts – for instance, ownership and privacy – can also be gradually changed (Kudina & Verbek, 2019). This is exactly what is pursued by the big tech companies.
For the purpose of even further maximizing their profits, companies like Facebook install new legal normative acts in the frameworks of their influence in order to obtain the information they monetize, gradually stirring the masses to accept it. However, as White (2016) rightfully postulates, subjects, whose data is collected, “believe they still own their data – but that is far from the truth” (p. 4). Taking into account the current state of the matters concerning the practices of handling data on various online platforms – and the Internet at large – people’s rights are being violated constantly. White argues that the only acceptable option for this scenario is “when data is used, informed consent should be given by the subject (2016, p. 4). The option to refuse data collection in most social account is merely “a pit stop” before going on a highway of data transmission, in truth, it constitutes minimal value (White, 2016, p. 4). It is due to these unethical processes that Facebook – and subsequently Instagram – indulges in those the users’ rights are violated.
Counter-Ethical Privacy Norms
Another significant part of the incident is its concerns with privacy of the user information – ranging from content to the activity on the platform. According to White, “privacy is the ability to be free from disturbance or observation” (2019, p. 3). Yet, the main problem about privacy in the digital space is connected to the ignorance of the masses. This was especially graphic in a study conducted by Ravn, Barnwell & Neves (2020), where a specific set of intimate content – family pictures – were selected to formulate a more definite understanding of the “publicly available” (p. 43). Due to the research team’s high ethical standards, every owner of every picture they used was contacted and asked permission from. This resulted in a particularly interesting outcome: some individuals changed their profile settings to private. This raises a question about how many people on Instagram are actually aware of the fact that their content is fully accessible to anyone on the platform (Ravn, Barnwell & Neves, 2020). Thus, this lack of awareness about the state of one’s data is what benefits big tech companies immensely.
The place of Instagram in this discourse is particularly fascinating. As mentioned by Ravn, Barnwell & Neves (2020), Roland Barthes located “the blur of public and private at the very advent of photography” – with the onset of photography corresponding exactly with the end of privacy, its “explosion into the public” (p. 42). Instagram, being a predominantly image-driven social network, must be at the focal point of this privacy-dissipating phenomenon and thus, its associated privacy issues are expected.
Targeted Ads and How Far the Advertisers Can Go
Instagram / Facebook is infamous for employing unethical practices for maximizing its profits. For this particular reason, this company is of utter most interest for an ethics researcher to scrutinize. Leaver notes that Facebook’s “poor history of dealing with customer privacy” leads to an understandable suspicion towards their management of Instagram (2015, p. 157). A particularly interesting ethical question is raised by it: what is the extent of such a surveillance that can still be considered acceptable by those subject to it – or can surveillance be ethical at all.
This ethical issue – one of gathering digital footprints – is central to contemporary discussion about the Internet. In this paradigm, as noted by Finnemore (2018), it is important for users to realize that they are the “crops” harvested by big tech companies, this being solely the reason their services come at no cost (p. 458). This act of “instrumentalizing” humans, as Finnemore argues, is inherently unethical and people “can never be means”, as they have an ethical standing themselves (2018, p. 458). This is the exact notion that the tech companies dominating the Internet, are aiming to change. It is debatable whether this is a violation of individual rights for an ethical treatment or an emergence of a new type of ethics.
Analysis of the Process of the Case
It is important to start at the beginning in order to obtain results clear and unbiased as much as it is possible. First of all, one must remember that the change of the Terms of Use occurred several months after Facebook bought Instagram –logically suggesting that it was initiated by the chief company. Thus, all the prior history about Facebook’s – currently Meta – business model and the scandalous behavior associated with it, becomes from this moment on fully applicable to Instagram. Lauer (2021) concludes that “Facebook’s business model is focused entirely on increasing growth and user engagement” (p. 401). Moreover, Facebook deliberately refuses to adhere to the currently-growing norms about company transparency; it has never exposed its recommendation and ad algorithms and will unlikely to do so in the future (Lauer, 2021). Thus, it is clear that the update on Terms of Use was made to fit Instagram into Facebook’s business model while utilizing Instagram’s database to its fullest potential.
However, the most interesting events come after the updated Terms went into effect. After inspecting the new Terms, an impressive number of Instagram users were outraged; many left the platform – with 42% decrease in daily active users in the month following the update (Chang, 2013). Such a dynamic clearly shows the previously discussed perception gap concerning the main ethical issues in discussion – the lack of ownership and privacy. With the Terms that allowed to “host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, display, translate and create derivative works” the company had the right to operate the content in any way without technically owning it (Terms of Use). As a result of comprehension, and subsequently, a wide array of interpretations and speculations of these lines, the general public was met with a difficult decision. One must decide whether to trust Instagram with their data, hoping that the company’s ethical standards comply with the general understanding of the right to ownership and privacy.
As shown by evidence, this is far from being the truth. People see Instagram as a medium to share their lives in an intimate manner with their close circle – as shown in the study by Ravn, Barnwell & Neves (2020). Their research proves that the media that is simply “discoverable” is not always intended to be broadly public (Ravn, Barnwell & Neves, 2020, p. 44). By making their content available to everyone on the Internet, people actually do not think of all of Internet’s users as their target audience, rather, they intend only their close friends and family to see it. This is the main reason that caused such an upheaval in the media at the time Instagram’s 2013 Terms of Use were published – people experienced a certain clash of perception – as they understood the immense difference between how they view their content and how the company does.
When aiming to showcase even more extreme versions of sensitive data that is, in reality, an especially frequent type of Instagram content, it is appropriate to mention sharenting. The so-called “intimate surveillance” that parents impose on their children, according to Leaver (2015), is exactly what normalizes surveillance mechanisms in the society at grand scale (p. 158). In this manner, by making their services friendly and available to such an intimate content as infant pictures, or even ultrasound scans of fetuses, Instagram is able to compile an immense amount of data. This process is absolutely legal, since the users themselves submit the content to the platform.
However, what stirring the Instagram’s founders’ decision, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, can be easily understandable. Owning a platform with 80 million users in 2013, right after the purchase, it would be unwise not to try to extract some kind of profit off the gigantic audience and even bigger mass of content (Leaver, 2015, p. 156). As Woiceshyn (2011) states, the CEOs generally tend to apply two main principles in their decision making – a reality principle and value creation (p. 315). Both of these are traceable in the case at hand. Value creation is, essentially, what drives every business – and it was exactly what drove Instagram to alter the Terms of Use – it’s an act of “rational self-interest” (Woiceshyn, 2011, p. 315). This is precisely what any company does in order to elevate itself to a next significant milestone in its evolution: first, it assesses its current situation, applying the reality principle, and from there, it seeks to maximize its profits, applying value creation principle.
The only thing that can be considered flawed in this decision mechanism is the fact that Instagram CEOs have attempted it too soon. The decision seems to be forced, as if Instagram had to momentarily set into motion the revenue streams because Facebook had purchased it and naturally, was looking to monetize its new acquisition. However, the rollback to the previous version of Terms means that Instagram retains its integrity and its values, along with an independence to some extent. It is willing to alter its policy course to fit the model that the majority of users was eager to accept. It was a wise decision to revert to the previous version, with Systrom noting that “rather than obtain permission from you, we are going to take the time to complete our plans” (Balowin, 2012). Given the feedback that the decision received, it was the wisest outcome one could provoke for the long-term profit, as further incompliance with user opinion could lead to the demise of the platform.
Contrary to criticism of Instagram, the company appears to be concerned with objectivity and embracing different cultures and perspectives. In an interview, referring to their developing hateful speech censoring technology, Systrom mentioned a “community team” – a group of strictly bilingual people with different ethnic backgrounds that constantly interact with Instagram users to receive feedback (Thompson, 2017, 7:05). This is particularly notable, as it shows that Instagram is aiming to combat bias and is minimally biased itself, or at least aware of it.
A Possible Resolution
While the criticism the company has received originates in concerns that have a point from an ethical view, the actions conducted by Instagram after the backlash are rational and focused on finding balance. It is hard to criticize the company’s decisions in their problem-solving skills. However, the initial decision to allow advertisers to interfere with the user data beyond statistics and ad targeting was conducted too aggressively. As seen in a study by Matz, Appel & Kosinski (2020), the potential resolution for the privacy paradox that digital marketing entails is the introduction of privacy by design. The disclosure methods of a company should be regulated by a co-profitable standard, where the user data is handled appropriately and the advertisement is displayed on the basis of this user data. However, the data should never leave the platform – as Matz, Appel & Kosinski postulate, privacy can be also understood as contextual integrity and thus the information is able only to remain private when used in the context it was collected (2020). One limit to this approach is the lack of partners: the parties that would handle customer data and use it for advertisement purposes.
The remedy for this may lie in the field of conscious affiliate marketing in the case of semi-popular accounts or Insta-famous influencers. The components of this scheme are the same; yet the act of sponsorship is made explicit to the users, and thus, consent is obtained. Silvia (2019) proves the point that “74% of consumers nowadays will depend on their social networks to guide the purchases” and affiliate marketing is the primary method of doing so (p. 9). Using that alternative with Instagram-native brands would make the platform feel more authentic and exclusive – while still keeping user data inside.
Conclusion
This particular moment in Instagram history is exemplary of its character as a company. During the backlash following the change to the Terms of Use, Instagram was made to clearly define their position when referring to user data. They reverted to their original legal documents, an act which not many successful companies are able to do – showing that they were still majorly influenced by their users’ opinion and cared about feedback.
References
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