Instagram is poised to be one of the worst breeding grounds for political fake news ahead of the 2020 election , and hardly anyone is paying attention.

The Facebook-owned platform has largely escaped the leery eye cast upon its parent company and Twitter, which have taken most of the blame for housing foreign disinformation campaigns in 2016. But Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform that the Internet Research Agency Russias Kremlin-linked troll farm used to target voters in the last election, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And as one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, Instagram has around 1 billion active users (more than three times as many as Twitter ) and is a go-to source for political news among Gen Zers most of whom will be old enough to vote next year.

By following just one conspiracy-minded account on Instagram, users can wind up viewing dozens more all promoted by a platform that is designed to keep them on the app even if it means distributing propaganda to do so.

Instagram has skated by, said Paul Barrett, an adjunct law professor at New York University and author of the report Disinformation and the 2020 Election . People dont realize the potential for sliding into the swamp of disinformation on Instagram.

Rewarding Fake News

I wanted to see firsthand how political disinformation performs on Instagram, so I created a new account and searched for profiles promoting QAnon the viral, far-right conspiracy theory movement that baselessly claims theres a deep-state cabal of Satanic, liberal pedophiles trying to take down Trump. It wasnt hard to find them. The first QAnon profile I saw had nearly 60,000 followers, and after I clicked on it, Instagram took the reins and recommended dozens more for me to follow.