T.I., Busta Rhymes & Others Fall For Instagram Rule Change Hoax

On Tuesday, a ton of celebrities were reposting on Instagram a screenshot of a paragraph in opposition to new guidelines that the app was supposedly adopting. The message warned that starting the following day, Instagram would own your content, meaning it would have the authorization to use anything you have posted against you, whether deleted or not. People were sharing this photo to explicitly express their denial of this authorization: “I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Instagram permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future.” The message even went as far as to cite legal justifications for the privacy and ownership of one’s content. 

Understandably, this frightened many, especially rappers who often post questionable or incriminating stuff that could leave them targeted for probation violation, for example. However, turns out all this hysteria was for nothing. Instagram dispelled these rumors with a brief message from their brand communications manager, Stephanie Otway: “There’s no truth to this post”.  

Perhaps the invalidity of this post was foreseeable, given it all the grammatical errors in it and possessing the paranoia of a chain email your grandmother would send you. But as the paragraph stated and many captioned their posts, “better safe than sorry”.