23rd October, 2020
American photo and video sharing social networking service, Instagram has apologised for flagging #EndSARS posts as fake.
Footage and images from the Lekki Toll Plaza shooting on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 which showed operatives of the Nigerian Army shooting at unarmed #EndSARS protesters were flagged down.
Also, Instagram flagged down a series of posts in support of #EndSARS protest killings, as false information.
The App users received messages of, “False: The same false information was reviewed in another post by fact-checkers. There may be small differences. Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.”
This development came as a huge disappointment to many Nigerian users as the company refused to be of help in a critical time and it was believed by many that Instagram was joining forces with the Nigerian government to frustrate the course of the #EndSARS campaign.
In a recent tweet by Instagram Comms, the social media giant said, “Yesterday our systems were incorrectly flagging content in support of #EndSARS, and marking posts as false. We are deeply sorry for this. The issue has now been resolved, and we apologize for letting our community down in such a time of need.”
See post below.
Yesterday our systems were incorrectly flagging content in support of #EndSARS, and marking posts as false. We are deeply sorry for this. The issue has now been resolved, and we apologize for letting our community down in such a time of need.
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 22, 2020