Instagram's Take on Equity.
In 2021, Meta (then, Facebook) company, Instagram, established an Equity Team to, "address the challenges that people from marginalized backgrounds may face," on the platform. The group collaborated with creatives, activists, policy experts, and many others to come to three pillars that would support their work:
Helping every Instagram employee prioritize building equitable products and tools
Promoting fairness on the platform through our technology and automated systems
Using Instagram to create more opportunities for empowerment.
They committed $25M to Black creators across Facebook and Instagram the year prior. As part of that investment, they launched a new program to equip the next generation of Black creators with the funding and resources to succeed on and off-line.
Recently the team announced another step in their work: over the next few months, people on Instagram in the United States may see a prompt asking them for their race or ethnicity. The prompt leads to a survey that will collect insights on how individuals use the platform and are working with Texas Southern University, University of Central Florida, Northeastern University, and Oasis Labs as partner research institutions.
This information will allow IG to, "better understand the experiences different communities have on Instagram, how our technology may impact different groups, and if there are changes we can make to promote fairness."
This is all really exciting to me. While many tech companies have moved on after the sweeping promises made in the wake of George Floyd's murder, this effort seems to remain promising. More on what Meta is doing overall here.
Did you know about Instagram's Equity Team? Have you seen the survey prompt yet?
