Instagram is under mounting pressure after an investigation discovered that pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying and openly anti-Semitic reels were being pushed to millions of users.
A report by Fortune discovered that the objectionable content has been put directly alongside ads from some of America’s biggest corporations, including JPMorgan and SUNY. The posts even emerged alongside advertisements for the US Army.
The disclosures come just months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg drastically reduced content rules and dismantled the company’s US fact-checking program.
Zuckerberg defended the shift as a return to ‘prioritising free speech’, but critics say it has resulted in extremist propaganda being more readily available on the platform.
At the centre of the controversy is a now-defunct account for a fashion brand known as @forbiddenclothes.
The account appears to have been deleted, but previously posted fascist-themed memes to massive engagement, Fortune reported.
One of its pinned reels, as seen by Fortune along with 31 million others, featured a Nazi SS Officer from the film Inglorious Basterds being used as part of a meme captioned, ‘When the family is arguing about politics and they ask for my expert opinion’.
Comments criticising the clip’s use for glorifying Nazism were vastly outnumbered by positive responses, according to the report, which also said that engaging with the reel opened a gateway to more egregious content.
One reel, which followed, showed an AI-fabricated ‘translation’ of an alleged Adolf Hitler speech, with graphics claiming to identify Jewish people in Trump’s cabinet and at major media organisations.
The video, viewed 1.4 million times, featured stars of David photoshopped onto people’s faces.
Comments included: ‘We owe the big man an apology’, referencing Hitler. Another user wrote: ‘He was right about everything.’
A Fortune reporter found Holocaust-denial memes, including one featuring a ‘small-brain’ figure saying, ‘He gassed millions of people. Read a history book,’ and a ‘big-brain’ figure replying, ‘Who wrote the history books?’
The post, which suggests that the Holocaust was manufactured by Jewish people by playing into racist conspiracy theories about Jewish people controlling media, gathered 3.2million views and more than 250,000 interactions.
After Fortune flagged the posts to Meta, the clips quietly vanished, but not before they had been circulated widely.
The content occurred in a way that experts say is a result of Instagram’s algorithm reward system.
Once a user interacts with even a single fascist-coded reel, Instagram’s recommendation engine ‘personalises’ a feed that rapidly morphs into a stream of anti-Semitic conspiracies, racist jokes, and glorification of Nazi imagery, usually packaged as humour or as an edgy, ironic aesthetic.
There’s a huge amount of far-right content online at the moment, and what it boils down to is making money, and by those standards, the entire internet is culpable, and this is why Trump and Musk want light censorship of the internet so they can get rich from these radical views.
Not everything is Nazi, but the left appears to believe it is because they have no concept of the word and its definition. However, free speech is free speech, and if you don’t like what the platform says, then boycott it.
Fascism and communism are two peas in a pod, yet communism has been getting a free pass perpetually, but that’s because there are powerful fools out there who still believe it works and is a good choice.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 