Every day, we see more and more partnerships forming between creators and businesses. When done well, these can drive meaningful value for creators, businesses and most importantly, for people. To ensure these partnerships continue to provide real experiences and genuine interactions, we will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity. We've built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity. This type of behavior is bad for the community, and third-party apps that generate inauthentic likes, follows and comments violate our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.

We're taking a number of steps to limit this kind of unwelcome behavior. Accounts we identify will receive an in-app message alerting them that we've removed the inauthentic activity given to their account from others. We will also ask them to secure their account by changing their password. Accounts that use these types of apps share their username and password, which is sometimes used to give inauthentic likes, follows and comments to others.

There are some accounts that may have unknowingly shared their login credentials with a third-party app. If you receive an in-app message, simply change your password to revoke their access to your account. These new measures will be ongoing, and accounts that continue to use third-party apps to grow their audience may see their Instagram experience impacted.

Since the early days of Instagram, we have auto-detected and removed fake accounts to protect our community. Today's update is another step in keeping Instagram a vibrant community where people can connect with the people and things they love. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks on additional measures we are taking to remove inauthentic activity on Instagram.