On Facebook, bad information often rises from obscurity. The spread of a single viral message on Instagram appears to be more of a top-down process, finding audiences in the manner of a product or trend promoted by influencers. On Facebook, the viral machinery is visible, intended to show you not just how many people have shared something, but where it came from and what people think about it. On Instagram, there is no one-tap way to repost content, so a repost takes a bit of work — screenshot, manual credit, re-caption — and is therefore understood as an endorsement, not unlike a choice to wear a piece of clothing or drink a particular drink.

The Recitation of the Legalistic Incantations

This sort of false information — low-stakes and extremely popular — deserves debunking wherever it appears. But revisiting the “copypasta” panics of the past, and the confident, defiant corrections they inspired, makes for strange reading. Consider the 2009 Facebook post about sharing data with Google. This did not happen. Facebook did, however, remake its service as an “application platform,” providing a simple way for third parties to build apps within Facebook, and for users to provide profile information to those apps, instantly. That went badly. The platform also introduced its own search engine, Graph Search, which allowed users to search profiles and posts that had been made public by their creators — content that, while technically available already, was suddenly much easier to find. Facebook was not about to start charging users in 2009, as a copy-paste meme suggested. In 2018, however, Sheryl Sandberg entertained the possibility on TV, and Mark Zuckerberg alluded to it in a Senate hearing.

The Instagram panic of 2019 earned a swift denial from the company — “There’s no truth to this post,” a spokesperson told reporters — and dozens of confident debunking stories. These, too, can make for strange reading. “How did this ridiculous Instagram privacy hoax from 2012 fool so many stars?” asks a headline on Mashable. It’s a fair question, answered not just by the article, but by a related video promoted right below it: “WATCH: Instagram users’ location data, stories were tracked by marketing company.” Or by the stories in the site’s various sidebars and content modules that surround the story: “Facebook’s ‘clear history’ tool doesn’t actually ‘clear’ anything,” or “Instagram can’t stop flood of grisly photos from teen’s murder so users step up,” or, published five days ago, “Instagram will let users report ‘false information.’”

It is fair but maybe not adequate to call posts like these “hoaxes,” or to prosecute them as a form of mis- or disinformation. The jokester never comes forward. If they’re spam, they’re missing a spammer to cash in. What are they? Are they a bit like chants, or spells, meant to ward off the spirit of Zuck? Rearranged, the lines sound like bad but earnest poetry:

Everything you’ve ever posted becomes public from today Don’t forget tomorrow starts The new Instagram rule

In this spirit, the part of the post that first reads as most ridiculous could be the one worth taking seriously. The text suggests that all of the things that Instagram will allegedly do to you “tomorrow” can be stopped by pasting a chunk of text, citing some laws and telling the company what’s what. “With this statement, I give notice.”

Where might we have heard this tone and language before? From Instagram itself, in, for example, the arbitration notice at the top of its terms of use, posted in bold and all caps: “YOU AGREE THAT DISPUTES BETWEEN YOU AND US WILL BE RESOLVED BY BINDING, INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION.”

Or a bit further down the page: “We do not claim ownership of your content, but you grant us a license to use it.”