If you have an Instagram account geared towards cars, word your captions carefully.
Ever since the first car transmission was wrought into existence, engineers, gear heads, and regular drivers have abbreviated transmission to its first five letters.
When used in the context of cars, almost everyone knows what you’re referring to. But for programmed filters on popular social media apps like Instagram, which scans millions of captions a second, using that abbreviation might set off a false positive for hate speech resulting in flagged posts, deleted comments, or worse, a deleted account.
That’s what happened to whoever runs the popular American Classic Car Instagram Account “Rotting American Classics” aka @rotting_American_classics on Instagram earlier this week.
He used the abbreviation for transmission on posts one too many times, and Instagram threatened to delete his account if he continued to do so.
Here’s his caption warning his fellow followers below.
“Well guys I’m not sure how many times I’m gonna get flagged for this but I wouldn’t recommend referring to transmission in short because every time I do I get flagged. S****d i***t Instagram people even if I was referring to what they are assuming, who cares? “How dare you! Don’t assume my reference”.”
Facebook uses a sophisticated algorithm, aided by Artificial Intelligence and human review, to detect hate speech.
In an Instagram update on their policy on hate speech earlier this year Instagram states that,
“Between July and September of last year, we took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram, including in DMs, 95% of which we found before anyone reported it.”
Scanning for words like that abbreviation for transmission, and other hot topic words, is one way to broadly identify captions and content that might contain potential hate speech.
But, as it’s used in American English when talking about cars, its use as an abbreviation is unavoidable with no correlation attacking protected classes.
There are accounts dedicated to that Pontiac and many race series that have that word
Here, it’s clear that American Rotting Classics is 100 percent a car account, they dedicate all their posts to what its Instagram handle is, and its user does not promote (afaik) any attacks on people based on their characteristics using hate speech.
For Instagram to flag his posts for using that abbreviation shows their algorithm needs some serious tweaking considering the rest of ARC’s posts.
What I think happened is, based on this page’s demographics being mostly male, its handle using the word American, and where this account is based (North Dakota, ranked one of the worst states for equality) Instagram’s algorithm has already preemptively flagged his account for special scrutiny.
My guess for the loopy algorithm logic probably goes, “An account geared towards males with “American” in its name (a word somehow skewed to right-wing idealogies as of late) with posts originating from that part of the United States, they’re clearly going to use some hate speech, eventually.”
Whereas other car accounts are given the benefit of the doubt and presumably human review for captions using the abbreviation for transmission, posts from flagged accounts with higher potential for hate speech using that abbreviation are immediately deleted.
If a large part of your livelihood depends on Instagram or you have a large following and “depend” on this social media app, consider using a different abbreviation for transmission or using the whole word as is.
Abbreviations include using AT, MT, and Tmsn. You can also just use gearbox.
It’s bull you-know-what, I know, but, clearly, Instagram’s Algorithm needs work and they’re going to side with protecting their stakeholders and advertisers by immediately deleting your post before expending human resources vetting and clearing your “clearly not hate speech” caption.
