> According to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
> You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your content or information, without any compensation to you. If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.
> If you don't want this, delete your facebook account
What? I thought I could just paste a paragraph of all-caps legalese to my profile, and it would solve this!
steve1977 · 2026-06-29 15:04:12 UTC
This made me laugh and cry at the same time...
pbhjpbhj · 2026-06-29 15:50:48 UTC
To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.
realusername · 2026-06-29 17:43:13 UTC
Both sounds kind of the same thing to me, a wall of text that nobody will read and each essentially saying "I have the right to do whatever I want"
hmry · 2026-06-29 17:46:10 UTC
I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description
smalltorch · 2026-06-29 15:05:59 UTC
Those are incredible terms that no one read.
acdha · 2026-06-29 15:17:10 UTC
I cancelled my Instagram account when they added those terms in the early 2010s. At the time it was mostly photographers reading them and closing accounts but it wasn’t exactly a secret.
alex1138 · 2026-06-29 20:36:21 UTC
I get sad because people liked Insta pre-Zuckerberg. Like, it was growing. People seem to couch it in terms of "They had 12 employees. They weren't going anywhere". But they were. Zuckerberg just wanted to enlargen his war chest
I refuse to sign up for an Insta. I will not acquiesce to 'lol we're going to put a login wall on every page'
Groxx · 2026-06-29 17:24:00 UTC
Almost literally every single social media site in the past ~15+ years has had those exact terms in it.
Everything you upload, almost everywhere, can be used by the site owners to do whatever they like for their own purposes (reselling is somewhat often excluded / non-transferrable). There are a handful of exceptions, but they're very much exceptions, not the normal rule.
greggsy · 2026-06-29 18:42:42 UTC
HN maybe?
victorbjorklund · 2026-06-29 19:39:26 UTC
HN terms: "By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed."
digitaltrees · 2026-06-29 20:15:54 UTC
Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits. But they don’t need to actually do stupid, disrespectful stuff with that power.
Remember the Zuck quote when asked why people gave him their data: “they trust me, dumb f*cks”.
When someone shows you who they are, trust them. He should be banned from having user data.
endofreach · 2026-06-29 22:35:32 UTC
> Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits
No, they do not. They do need to have people believe they do need to.
DANmode · 2026-06-29 19:50:39 UTC
[flagged]
AlienRobot · 2026-06-29 20:12:12 UTC
Do you really expect us to read the terms of service of the service we use?!
iinnPP · 2026-06-29 20:39:07 UTC
If you want to complain afterwards, yes.
bluefirebrand · 2026-06-29 21:17:12 UTC
I would suggest that the services expect that we don't, which is why they are comfortable putting absolutely anything they want in the terms
rootusrootus · 2026-06-29 15:56:21 UTC
> If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.
To be fair, if they actually honor this promise, and if it means what it sounds like in plain English -- i.e. that if you only posted your photo for friends, only friends can ever see it even if FB uses it for advertising -- that is a halfway decent mitigation of the issue. Not ideal, but then again, you're not paying for FB, so what did you really expect?
microgpt · 2026-06-29 16:16:32 UTC
"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.
bryanrasmussen · 2026-06-29 17:48:19 UTC
respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.
fweimer · 2026-06-29 20:39:28 UTC
I think you got it backwards. Wouldn't it be way worse if they used your likeness for advertising to your friends? Compared to random people who don't know you?
Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has a long history of abusing user trust. It has been fined billions for illegal activities like unauthorised data harvesting (Cambridge Analytica), illegal facial recognition, and mishandling children’s private information. Beyond what’s illegal, Meta is ethically notorious for emotional manipulation experiments, addictive design targeted at teenagers, rampant surveillance (even of non-users), promoting misinformation, and ignoring research that shows its products harm mental health.
Yes, like immediately after they were beta on unsuspecting university students. Anyone with a Facebook in 2026, ...well we can't just say they deserve it because that is definitely (no sarcasm intended) blaming the victim.
But sometimes it feels like, why does the Nigerian Prince scam keep working after 30 plus years? Do we have to sacrifice the weak and vulnerable to have any sense of freedom and creativity? I don't know honestly ...perhaps?
bryanrasmussen · 2026-06-29 18:10:03 UTC
I wonder if terms and conditions vary between jurisdictions. I would guess so.
Xunjin · 2026-06-29 19:52:35 UTC
They can definitely be questioned in courts.
bryanrasmussen · 2026-06-29 21:21:15 UTC
Yes, but let us suppose I am a big company.
I have lawyers make up terms and conditions that are really great for me, but which might cause real problems in some specific jurisdiction. Do I serve two terms and conditions or just one and hope I don't get in trouble.
I think once I'm big enough and have expensive lawyers might as well craft the terms appropriate to areas.
But now gets tricky in area A I can say "We have the right to change these terms and conditions unilaterally at any time we wish and you will be bound by the new conditions"
Now someone in area A moves to area B where terms and conditions are not as great for my company, and where you are not allowed to change terms and conditions unilaterally. Maybe I change terms for A to B immediately when they move to B so I don't get problems. But now they move out of B back to A, I probably have to ask them to agree to A conditions again.
Anyway, it is funny wondering just how nefarious these companies are with the terms and conditions.
like_any_other · 2026-06-29 19:00:12 UTC
> If you don't want this, delete your facebook account
All that will happen is this term or similar will appear in some other "contract" of adhesion. Your bank? Your motherboard's EULA? Paypal or LLM vendor terms? Your phone OS/ISP? Your car? Anywhere and everywhere where some necessity of modern life is provided by a faceless multinational corporation.
If you don't want this, organize and lobby against it politically. That's what corporations do when they want to screw us over, and it's working great for them. Is the act-as-an-isolated-mere-consumer approach working great for us?
PakG1 · 2026-06-29 21:15:58 UTC
I understand that I give them permission. That's partly why I'm not a producer of content on those platforms, though I'll consume now and then. But I'll rarely produce text (other than usually a happy birthday now and then), and I'll never produce photos.
But what about the people in my photographs, whether on purpose or not? Did they give permission? That's the part that Meta doesn't really want to address.
slumberlust · 2026-06-29 22:15:55 UTC
If car mfgs can engross passengers in ToS they may never see; I'd guess yes. At least until someone challenges it.
rrgok · 2026-06-30 06:28:20 UTC
I give you the permission, but license cost for using my things is 30% of the revenue.
cwillu · 2026-06-30 07:50:10 UTC
Funny, because I got a payout last year from facebook settling a class action suit about their use of my and others' likeness in their fucking sponsored stories.
which is a german language scam site. i have no explanation how this happened, whether it is xcancel.com doing this or something loaded from twitter that caused xcancel to do this. never seen anythin like it before, would like to know more.
btw any further reloads of the xcancel url to that tweet totally work as expected.
pavel_lishin · 2026-06-29 14:36:20 UTC
Throwing an additional anecdote into the bucket, this did not happen for me. Any chance you have a dodgy extension installed?
jadamson · 2026-06-29 15:02:08 UTC
Sure you didn't just make a typo and hit a squatted domain?
kuschkufan · 2026-06-29 17:14:40 UTC
did not think of that, maybe it's this. i tried a couple typos just now and holy shit most of these are registered and you land on some really dodgy shit, i.e. porn and sites that seem to try out browser exploits. did not find the scam site from earlier, but can't count it out either.
do not go to sites like xancel.com, xcancl.com, xcncl.com .. they are not safe. damn typoswatters.
jijijijij · 2026-06-29 16:31:47 UTC
Doubt. xcancel.com does not even seem to have any advertisements at all, when I disable ublock. Site seems remarkable clean, no thirdparty connections apart from a cdn. Sure you didn't type cancelx.com? Cause there something shady is going on. Otherwise, I would strongly suggest checking your extensions or system for malware.
hsuduebc2 · 2026-06-29 14:10:34 UTC
I mean, what would you expect from company with morality of tobacco and slot machines producer? This is the least evil they are doing.
This thing resurface from time to time. It's the small text you never read. In this case, small part in ridiculously and intentionally big eula.
avgDev · 2026-06-29 16:37:20 UTC
I am surprised with the downvotes. Meta is the new tobacco corp.
fullshark · 2026-06-29 14:11:21 UTC
Ten years ago maybe this causes outrage, but I'm not sure anyone cares in 2026 including potential customers.
quadrature · 2026-06-29 14:15:50 UTC
Is there actual proof that they are doing this. Theres not much to go on in the tweet.
tantalor · 2026-06-29 14:24:01 UTC
Besides the proof in the screenshot? What more do you want?
Do you think this user is faking it?
quadrature · 2026-06-29 15:50:33 UTC
Yes people frequently fake screenshots on social media. I'd want either a screenshot from a credible person, reporting from a journalist, trusted blogger, company statement etc.
tantalor · 2026-06-29 17:01:36 UTC
I'm not a journalist, but I don't think a reporter would go much further than "one user said...".
There is no need for fact checking an individual source, other than to verify the reporting is accurately representing what they said.
quadrature · 2026-06-29 17:46:51 UTC
A credible journalist would not entertain writing a story based on a screenshot some random user posts on social media.
dabinat · 2026-06-29 18:59:11 UTC
Well the company statement is that they say they can do this in their terms of service. It seems very plausible that Meta is doing what their TOS says they’re allowed to do.
ryan42 · 2026-06-29 14:36:15 UTC
yes, it happened to me recently.
The photo wasn't mine, but showed a profile photo of one of my facebook friends, and it had the glasses and said "On my way!"
edoceo · 2026-06-29 14:53:39 UTC
And they have a history of doing this. And their privacy/ToS allows it.
tantalor · 2026-06-29 14:25:46 UTC
Comment on that thread:
> This seems entirely counter-productive and creepy.
Apt description of Instagram in general.
penr0se · 2026-06-29 14:26:19 UTC
This shouldn't really be surprising. It's very similar to what they did ~1.5 year ago when they started to use users' photos to promote Meta AI
It is just saying that if you don't pay for something, you are the product. I think it still fits well here.
alex1138 · 2026-06-29 22:10:11 UTC
You can pay for Meta Verified. I think you'll still get banned
I'm getting very tired of this trope. Businesses need to do better. End of story
fullshark · 2026-06-29 14:42:04 UTC
Kind of a stretch, these days can't imagine anyone that views instagram as a place to store their cherished photos also.
jijijijij · 2026-06-29 16:37:47 UTC
Yeah, and then the charging businesses start selling your stuff anyway. So really, it's the comic creator, who is naive.
RattlesnakeJake · 2026-06-29 14:42:12 UTC
Many years ago (back when Facebook still had sidebar ads), my sister was presented with a dating ad for "Hot Christian Singles" accompanied by a photo of our brother.
It was hilarious, but also mind-boggling. In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?
dewey · 2026-06-29 15:04:11 UTC
> In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?
Exactly in the scenario you just described. You still remember it and you are actively talking about it years after the fact.
fumblebee · 2026-06-29 15:22:22 UTC
wouldn't "useful ad" imply either 1) clicking through and buying the product or service, or else 2) building up a positive brand association to help increase sales later?
remembering an advert correlates but is different to it being valuable.
svachalek · 2026-06-29 16:48:52 UTC
Yeah I remember some studies showed this with overly sexy ads. They were very memorable to the audience but all they remembered was hot chicks, they couldn't recall the product.
RattlesnakeJake · 2026-06-29 15:26:10 UTC
But it didn't bring clicks to the website nor goodwill toward the company.
No one remembers who ran the ad. Even if we did, it would only be in a negative light due to a weird and off-putting advertising approach.
dewey · 2026-06-29 15:38:09 UTC
Don't get hung up on this specific example of the dating ad.
There's a difference between awareness campaigns and click / conversion campaigns and if there's some ads for a garden chair and your friend is sitting on it you'll definitely remember it more than some random model. Or clothes that are advertised on your body. Not saying that's the future we want, but it would definitely work for a while.
RattlesnakeJake · 2026-06-29 18:22:38 UTC
That doesn't come across as any less creepy to the average user: "They stole my friend's likeness to sell me a lawn chair" still feels slimy.
I'm sure the real reason is that Facebook added a poorly thought out feature to their marketing tools around that time, and someone just decided to try it out.
godwinson__4-8 · 2026-06-29 18:43:53 UTC
All this talk about how creepy Facebook is and yet most people use it? If Facebook was that creepy it wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. So they saw a "creepy" ad. They went "haha" or whatever and then kept using it. I mean how would you even quantify that the feature was "poorly thought out" or "slimy" at that point? If that was the case why didn't the user log off and never come back? Then at least Facebook would have a signal to work with.
Sometimes people really miss the forest for the trees. Most people actually like Facebook. If you can't wrap your head around that you have to accept you are distinct from the typical consumer. A trillion dollars is not made by appealing to the margins. If Facebook really sucked so bad everyone would log off.
Instead of another boring Facebook sucks comment why don't you ask your sibling why they didn't stop interacting with the website after that? You would probably learn more about the world doing that than trying to speculate about marketing tool features at a company you don't work for.
not_a_bot_4sho · 2026-06-29 15:40:16 UTC
Sounds like the viewers were highly unlikely to have clicked through. Cost the advertiser a view but lost the conversion.
Useful ad for Facebook. They made money on it. The advertiser didn't.
theNotFractured · 2026-06-29 18:41:42 UTC
If the viewers don't click on facebook, advertisers would stop advertising on facebook.
chrz · 2026-06-29 19:51:55 UTC
but lot of clicks doesnt happen because of the content
boelboel · 2026-06-29 16:23:44 UTC
Many people want to date their own friends? Seeing your friend is on the site would show it's okay to use?
dwa3592 · 2026-06-29 16:46:44 UTC
This is a ridiculous argument that just because someone still remembers something means it was a good advertising strategy. This is partly why advertising sucks. The correct metric in this case would be did the user actually go on the date with the said person or at least initiated the conversation. In this person's case, very likely not. So the strategy is dumb, ridiculous and laughable but not useful or good in any sense.
godwinson__4-8 · 2026-06-29 18:58:20 UTC
You seem ignorant of how money is made in these situations. The money is already made way before anyone ever goes on an actual date. Therefore the people showing you the ads are still incentivized to show the ad.
If you thought about things more clearly you would also realize that a platform that tried to measure something more like "how did the date actually go" would be even more dystopian. You want an algorithm to start pricing in the cost of you falling in love? If a date goes amazing should the software send you an additional invoice? People who use these apps are already essentially outsourcing interpersonal relationships. How far do you want to take that? The lack of precision is not "dumb, ridiculous and laughable" it's actually a saving grace.
hbn · 2026-06-29 16:57:55 UTC
Zero people in the process of creating that ad said "we'll suggest people date their siblings, it'll be so memorable"
That is absolutely not a success story when trying to market a Christian dating platform.
dewey · 2026-06-29 17:10:09 UTC
It's about the "in which scenario" question of the OP, not this dating ad in particular.
RIMR · 2026-06-29 20:13:05 UTC
They're married now, too.
PyWoody · 2026-06-29 16:01:09 UTC
Roll tide.
themaninthedark · 2026-06-29 19:10:02 UTC
I could see people clicking through to see if their friend had a dating profile, if not for the romantic interest the gossip interest.
RattlesnakeJake · 2026-06-29 20:38:35 UTC
Okay, this may actually explain it XD
invalidusernam3 · 2026-06-29 15:08:11 UTC
"I'm uncomfortable"
Should have read the terms and conditions
onemoresoop · 2026-06-29 15:36:25 UTC
What percentage of people read those? They’re even unitelligible to the layman.
hurfdurf · 2026-06-29 15:51:38 UTC
And that's how the HUMANCENTiPAD keeps growing.
dylan604 · 2026-06-29 16:17:20 UTC
Hey Siri, find the gotchas in this EULA being presented /s
srmatto · 2026-06-29 15:09:27 UTC
Is Meta abusing its users a problem? Yes. Does the TOS allow for it? Yes. Can people decide to just create a shell account and not actually participate? Sure.
One of the real insidious problems with Instagram and to some extent Facebook is that they provide a free, low friction way for business to communicate with current or potential customers. As a result many small businesses use Instagram as replacement for a public facing website and perhaps a blog or email newsletter. Many small business in my region depend on Instagram for this purpose, its nearly universal. It helps keep you stuck in Instagram so that you can see a business' hours, menu, or special events. I guess a shell account is the answer but you're still going to have to navigate the skinner box feed.
haliskerbas · 2026-06-29 15:13:13 UTC
Every time I try to create a shell account, it gets banned with no reason given. Even if it's just to follow a few influencer accounts.
srmatto · 2026-06-29 15:18:37 UTC
Well there you go, there is no reasonable way to be a non-participant while also staying up to date on businesses that choose to use the platform.
cute_boi · 2026-06-29 15:22:31 UTC
You can't create shell account on fb/meta anymore. They will ask to turn on camera and rotate your head.
ed_elliott_asc · 2026-06-29 15:37:56 UTC
Print out a face of someone on Facebook and use that?
afavour · 2026-06-29 16:01:20 UTC
It’ll be obvious when you turn “their” head that it’s not real.
rolph · 2026-06-29 17:14:08 UTC
print out a panagram of a head, and paste it to a lampshade, or use a mannequin head and describe how you were horribly burned as a child.
catlikesshrimp · 2026-06-29 15:40:33 UTC
U a manequin head. Add hair and moles. It mightbtake more than one try but it works.
Eventually, people who make shell accounts will be declared creepy child predators, but that isn't the case, yet.
breezybottom · 2026-06-29 18:40:42 UTC
I'm not making a mannequin head to see a restaurant menu.
Comments
Yes, 2013: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy
> According to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
> You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your content or information, without any compensation to you. If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.
So it's not new. If you don't want this, delete your facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/dialog/delete-your-informat...
What? I thought I could just paste a paragraph of all-caps legalese to my profile, and it would solve this!
I refuse to sign up for an Insta. I will not acquiesce to 'lol we're going to put a login wall on every page'
Everything you upload, almost everywhere, can be used by the site owners to do whatever they like for their own purposes (reselling is somewhat often excluded / non-transferrable). There are a handful of exceptions, but they're very much exceptions, not the normal rule.
Remember the Zuck quote when asked why people gave him their data: “they trust me, dumb f*cks”.
When someone shows you who they are, trust them. He should be banned from having user data.
No, they do not. They do need to have people believe they do need to.
To be fair, if they actually honor this promise, and if it means what it sounds like in plain English -- i.e. that if you only posted your photo for friends, only friends can ever see it even if FB uses it for advertising -- that is a halfway decent mitigation of the issue. Not ideal, but then again, you're not paying for FB, so what did you really expect?
https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ad...
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
It is unlikely that Meta will suddenly gain morals scruples to avoid profiting from user content, with or without user consent.
This is the same company that invasively spies on its own employees, to train AI models.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-accidentally-let-employees-...
Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has a long history of abusing user trust. It has been fined billions for illegal activities like unauthorised data harvesting (Cambridge Analytica), illegal facial recognition, and mishandling children’s private information. Beyond what’s illegal, Meta is ethically notorious for emotional manipulation experiments, addictive design targeted at teenagers, rampant surveillance (even of non-users), promoting misinformation, and ignoring research that shows its products harm mental health.
https://leehopkins.com/meta-data-abuse-revealed/
I have lawyers make up terms and conditions that are really great for me, but which might cause real problems in some specific jurisdiction. Do I serve two terms and conditions or just one and hope I don't get in trouble.
I think once I'm big enough and have expensive lawyers might as well craft the terms appropriate to areas.
But now gets tricky in area A I can say "We have the right to change these terms and conditions unilaterally at any time we wish and you will be bound by the new conditions"
Now someone in area A moves to area B where terms and conditions are not as great for my company, and where you are not allowed to change terms and conditions unilaterally. Maybe I change terms for A to B immediately when they move to B so I don't get problems. But now they move out of B back to A, I probably have to ask them to agree to A conditions again.
Anyway, it is funny wondering just how nefarious these companies are with the terms and conditions.
All that will happen is this term or similar will appear in some other "contract" of adhesion. Your bank? Your motherboard's EULA? Paypal or LLM vendor terms? Your phone OS/ISP? Your car? Anywhere and everywhere where some necessity of modern life is provided by a faceless multinational corporation.
If you don't want this, organize and lobby against it politically. That's what corporations do when they want to screw us over, and it's working great for them. Is the act-as-an-isolated-mere-consumer approach working great for us?
But what about the people in my photographs, whether on purpose or not? Did they give permission? That's the part that Meta doesn't really want to address.
for some reason the url rewrote iteself to this: https://themenspiegel.click/c/de/52_merzchrupalla/?method=po...
which is a german language scam site. i have no explanation how this happened, whether it is xcancel.com doing this or something loaded from twitter that caused xcancel to do this. never seen anythin like it before, would like to know more.
btw any further reloads of the xcancel url to that tweet totally work as expected.
do not go to sites like xancel.com, xcancl.com, xcncl.com .. they are not safe. damn typoswatters.
This thing resurface from time to time. It's the small text you never read. In this case, small part in ridiculously and intentionally big eula.
Do you think this user is faking it?
There is no need for fact checking an individual source, other than to verify the reporting is accurately representing what they said.
The photo wasn't mine, but showed a profile photo of one of my facebook friends, and it had the glasses and said "On my way!"
> This seems entirely counter-productive and creepy.
Apt description of Instagram in general.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615538
https://xkcd.com/1150/
I'm getting very tired of this trope. Businesses need to do better. End of story
It was hilarious, but also mind-boggling. In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?
Exactly in the scenario you just described. You still remember it and you are actively talking about it years after the fact.
remembering an advert correlates but is different to it being valuable.
No one remembers who ran the ad. Even if we did, it would only be in a negative light due to a weird and off-putting advertising approach.
There's a difference between awareness campaigns and click / conversion campaigns and if there's some ads for a garden chair and your friend is sitting on it you'll definitely remember it more than some random model. Or clothes that are advertised on your body. Not saying that's the future we want, but it would definitely work for a while.
I'm sure the real reason is that Facebook added a poorly thought out feature to their marketing tools around that time, and someone just decided to try it out.
Sometimes people really miss the forest for the trees. Most people actually like Facebook. If you can't wrap your head around that you have to accept you are distinct from the typical consumer. A trillion dollars is not made by appealing to the margins. If Facebook really sucked so bad everyone would log off.
Instead of another boring Facebook sucks comment why don't you ask your sibling why they didn't stop interacting with the website after that? You would probably learn more about the world doing that than trying to speculate about marketing tool features at a company you don't work for.
Useful ad for Facebook. They made money on it. The advertiser didn't.
If you thought about things more clearly you would also realize that a platform that tried to measure something more like "how did the date actually go" would be even more dystopian. You want an algorithm to start pricing in the cost of you falling in love? If a date goes amazing should the software send you an additional invoice? People who use these apps are already essentially outsourcing interpersonal relationships. How far do you want to take that? The lack of precision is not "dumb, ridiculous and laughable" it's actually a saving grace.
That is absolutely not a success story when trying to market a Christian dating platform.
Should have read the terms and conditions
One of the real insidious problems with Instagram and to some extent Facebook is that they provide a free, low friction way for business to communicate with current or potential customers. As a result many small businesses use Instagram as replacement for a public facing website and perhaps a blog or email newsletter. Many small business in my region depend on Instagram for this purpose, its nearly universal. It helps keep you stuck in Instagram so that you can see a business' hours, menu, or special events. I guess a shell account is the answer but you're still going to have to navigate the skinner box feed.