Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Jairo Ferreira 268 Despite numerous complaints at the time, the net- work has been seeing increasing numbers, both of users and of posts and levels of engagement. In- cidentally, Instagram is the network that most engages today. 5. THE INSTAGRAM ALGORITHM 8 The Instagram algorithmhas a clear objective: that the user find what he wants most in the first place. And how does this work in practice? Well, the al- gorithm is based on three basic principles: 1. Temporality Although Instagram abandoned the chronological order of posts, that doesn’t mean that temporality doesn’t matter anymore. The network takes into account that users want to see new and recent content each time they use the app. Therefore, the posts do not appear in a chrono- logical order anymore, but still follow a temporal logic, being one of the criteria of the algorithm. 2. Engagement The engagement a post receives indicates its po- tential to engage more people on the network. Therefore, the chance of posts with many likes and, mainly, comments to be displayed to more users is greater, mainly posts that receive a lot of engagement in the first moments of your post. 3. Relationships You may have noticed that posts from close friends or your favorite brands always appear as soon as you open the app, right? This has a reason: Instagram analyzes the profiles you relate to the most to understand the relevance of the posts made to your experience. How is this analysis done? Through the com- ments you make, who you look for in the app and even the posts and Stories you share with other users. 8 https://rockcontent.com/br/blog/algoritmo-do-instagram/ .