By Monday, there were five videos of the Christchurch attack posted by meme pages in my feed. Four of them are still up, and on Tuesday, another was surfaced at the top of my feed. The captions on all the videos question the validity of the attack and claim that it was a false flag carried out by the U.S. government.

The top of my Instagram Explore page also featured a racist caricature of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, exaggerating her features and darkening her skin; a post about Hillary Clinton being a pedophile; a 4chan screenshot talking about a “beta Jew”; and yet another Christchurch false-flag post. My Explore page was littered with posts containing hashtags such as #PedoVore, #TheGreatAwakening, #WWG1WGA, #QAnon, #Spygate, #Pizzagate, and #TheStorm.

Read: The normalization of conspiracy culture

Given the velocity of the recommendation algorithm, the power of hashtagging, and the nature of the posts, it’s easy to see how Instagram can serve as an entry point into the internet’s darkest corners. Instagram “memes pages and humor is a really effective way to introduce people to extremist content,” says Becca Lewis, a doctoral student at Stanford and a research affiliate at the Data and Society Research Institute. “It’s easy, on Instagram, to attach certain hashtags to certain memes and get high visibility.”

Indeed, 344,000 Instagram posts currently include the hashtag #QAnon; 262,00 include the hashtag #WWG1WGA, a QAnon conspiracy phrase; 166,000 include the hashtag #Pizzagate. As of Tuesday afternoon, three of the top 12 Instagram posts featuring the hashtag #vaccines were promoting anti-vaccine messages—after Facebook announced last week that it would diminish the reach of anti-vaccine information on Facebook and Instagram. (Notably, these numbers don’t capture thousands of posts from private accounts. Many of Instagram’s biggest far-right meme accounts are private—a well-known tactic for fueling growth, but also a way to avoid scrutiny from outsiders and to prevent being reported.)

In December, Wired reported that Instagram had become the “go-to” social network for the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm notorious for meddling in U.S. elections. A report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee declared that “Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency” to spread misinformation. “Instagram has the power of Twitter to broadcast out, but the infrastructure of Facebook supporting it,” says Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia University who directs a center on digital forensics. “It has the best of all platforms.”

Next up: Instagram. It has everything: the algorithmic feed, the scale, the exposure and lots of people who went there to escape what was happening in Facebook's news feed. https://t.co/Cu2ab8nL6a — zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) March 20, 2019

And its mechanisms are more inscrutable. Last year, the company restricted API access—the service that processes requests for Facebook data from remote applications—following several Facebook data-breach scandals. According to Albright, this has stunted research efforts focused on the spread of misinformation and extremism. Just last fall, Albright’s research revealed that anti-Semitism on the platform was rising. He says he would be unable to carry out similar research today due to the recent API restrictions. “The ability for me to do a network analysis or look at how accounts are connected has basically gone away,” he says.

I’ve gotten several questions from journalists today re: "are platforms doing better combatting propaganda & disinformation?” I said maybe.



Then I pulled another you-know-who mention network (graph) from Instagram.



It’s not just bad, it’s #offthechain pic.twitter.com/ByMtjtuCC8 — Jဝnathan AIbright (@d1gi) October 25, 2018

Meme pages aren’t the only types of accounts bent on leveraging Instagram to radicalize young people. As The Daily Beast reported last fall, Instagram has become a haven for far-right figures such as Alex Jones, who has found a home on Instagram. Jones’s Infowars videos have flourished on IGTV, Instagram’s home for more long-form video content, where networks of accounts repost them.