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In private beta, a lot of users were using axiom to automate their likes and follows, to build up an audience on Instagram. They were doing this work manually i
by yaseer 6y ago
In private beta, a lot of users were using axiom to automate their likes and follows, to build up an audience on Instagram. They were doing this work manually in any case.
We would not want this to be done at scale, in a cloud, like a nefarious bot-farm. However, at the scale of a bot tied to a single individual's browser, doing repetitive work in growth-marketing and sales, we'd allow this usage.
- michaelmior 6y agoIsn't this a violation of Instagram's ToS?
- yaseer 6y agohttps://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371 Creating user accounts with bots, and crawling certainly is, but I can't see anything about automating likes (correct me if I'm wrong). There are many chrome extensions which do specifically automate likes on the Chrome store. Ours is just a chrome extension for general browser automation, where this is just one use-case.
- fenwick67 6y ago"We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means" ... "You must not create or submit unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications (a/k/a "spam") to any Instagram users."
- yaseer 6y agoOkay, I agree this a grey and perhaps questionable area. This seemed to be something legitimate people/users were doing a lot, so we gave them a building block to make it easier. Maybe we should have thought about it more. We'll take a step back from that path if our bots become a nuisance on social media. In all honesty, we built axiom with other things in mind (e.g. Repetitive data entry and admin).
- alwayseasy 6y agoIt's not grey it's a TOS violation. Facebook goes after these types of bots ruthlessly, especially in election season. I'd recommend not poking that bear, you have so many market opportunities!
- yaseer 6y agoOkay, we'll take this on board! It was honestly just some user requests we integrated without enough thought, not something nefarious. This isn't our market by any means.
- fenwick67 6y agoNo, we disagree because it's pretty black and white. It wasn't hard to Ctrl+f for "like" and "automat" in the TOS. Your team needs to do better.
- yaseer 6y agoLook, we've changed position and agree with you. The point I thought was 'grey' was whether automated likes harass people (Liking to build a following is now part of the standard Instagram marketing playbook). That is not worth debating though - we agree that TOS are violated. We were wrong and you are correct.