Facebook-owned photo-messaging app Instagram appears to be re-branding to include the parent company's name as part of its own.
"Instagram will have a new branding called 'Instagram from Facebook'," reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong tweeted on Thursday along with a screenshot of the re-branded name.
To establish full control over the different divisions of his company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been planning to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook into a unified platform.
The unified platform, would have a collective user-base of over 2.6 billion people and Zuckerberg aims to help them cross-communicate across the apps, the media had reported.
Earlier in March, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger spoke at the 2019 South By South West (SXSW) Conference and Festivals at Austin, Texas, since leaving Facebook last September, sore about losing independence within the Zuckerberg-led company.
"Instagram co-founder @kevin mentioned during SXSW 2019 that Instagram's autonomy has been being reduced. And this new branding is showing it," Wong added.
Neither Facebook nor Instagram has released an official statement on the subject as yet. The platform is also likely to get a secured messaging feature in 2020 which has raised concerns with security experts across the globe.
But that’s not all, according to an extensive report by The Economic Times, the photo-sharing platform has become a hub for lewd activities in the country – we’re talking about profiles created to offer sexual favours in return for money.
All this is happening on the virtual platform and it still isn’t clear whether the profiles created on Instagram are genuine, or whether they are people using stolen profiles to create these accounts for quick money – if it’s the latter, that’s a scary digital racket worth looking into.
We’ve already seen how other apps like Tik Tok, the video content-sharing platform, has come under scrutiny for lack of governance, which has lead to mass sharing of hateful, violent and obscene videos by its users.
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