BiasMedium
Bug in Instagram’s “Related Hashtags” Algorithm Allegedly Caused Disproportionate Treatment of Political Hashtags
- Occurred
- Aug 5, 2020
- Published
- Aug 5, 2020
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A bug was reported by Instagram’s spokesperson to have prevented an algorithm from populating related hashtags for thousands of hashtags, resulting in an allege preferential treatment for some politically partisan hashtags.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- Instagram users
Classification
Category confidence: 85%
Severity confidence: 80%
Rationale: Algorithm bug caused disproportionate treatment of political hashtags, indicating potential bias in content distribution.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8