This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss stunt blogging, Signal pains, and murderous Reels.
EMANUEL: Yesterday Jason wrote about Instagram delivering users reels showing murder, gore, and extreme violence. It’s hard to say exactly how many people saw these videos, but judging by what users have said online, and the fact that Meta felt the need to publicly apologize for the videos, which the company said it served users because of an error, suggest that these were very widespread.
I’ll admit that when Jason first flagged to us on Slack that this was happening it didn’t immediately strike me as a must do it immediately story. First, it’s kind of hard to suss out if what one or a handful of users say they see on Instagram is really a widespread problem or a very specific rabbit hole the algorithm put them in because of their particular Instagram habits. Second, I think that I’ve become numb to how terrible content on Meta platforms and Instagram in particular has become.