TechCrunch: Instagram Becomes an Interest Network with Hashtag Following

Friends and businesses are no longer the only accounts you can follow on Instagram after today’s announcement. According to a recent TechCrunch article, the photo-sharing app is now letting users follow hashtags to see top posts and Stories from a particular topic instead of viewing this content in the Explore tab or manually checking hashtags. The platform’s move should give advertiser’s more data for targeting their ads.

With its own algorithm, photos will be shown based on factors like recent and quality. Users can downvote a post they don’t want to see to continue to weed out spam and inappropriate content. Over the past few months of testing, the team has made a number of improvements about how posts rank and hundreds of employees will continue to monitor for trends and changes to the algorithm.

The new hashtag following feature aligns with Facebook’s goal of bringing the world closer together and gets users seeing content from outside of their own social networks, but opting into this feature will allow for customization of your current feed.