Instagram announced Monday (March 7) that they’ll be adding a new feature to ensure more Black creators are getting their deserved credit. The feature will specifically provide a special tag for professional accounts, content creators, and influencers to get credit for trends they start on the social media platform.
The new tag comes after complaints and public backlash from Black social media users who continuously see their work erased and whitewashed through algorithms and lack of due diligence on the part of companies, celebrities, and others.
“We want to ensure that as Black creators’ content is being distributed as it already is, they are getting the proper attribution,” Instagram engineer Cameryn Boyd told NBC News. Boyd, along with data analyst Alexis Michelle Adjei created the label for Instagram.
“Black creators and addressing that inequity in the creator ecosystem,” Adjei said, motivated their work.
Among the top social media influencers, there are twice as many white creators earning $100,000 than Black creators, despite the glaring difference in trendsetting Black content creators bring to these platforms. A December study showed that there’s a 29% pay gap between white and Black influencers.
Boyd and Adjei hope to close that gap by ensuring Black creators are getting the “opportunity to get all of those growth and monetization and career-starting opportunities like their contemporaries are.”
The new feature will hopefully allow Black creators go viral as well as their content.
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