Facebook boosts IP protection on Instagram to combat sales of counterfeit goods

Dive Brief:

Facebook updated its brand safety tools available to merchants, who can now search Instagram accounts and posts for content that infringes on their intellectual property, according to a company blog post published on Thursday.
Brand Rights Protection, formerly known as the Commerce and Ads IP tool, enables brands to upload up to 10 images to their accounts, for which Facebook will automatically scan on Instagram and its core social networking site to find unpermitted matches.
Rounding out the updates, brands will have access to a dashboard where they can track the status of their infringement reports. The update comes as brand safety and transparency are top-of-mind for the social media giant as public scrutiny of its business mounts.

Dive Insight:

To bolster trust with marketers ahead of the holiday shopping season, Facebook is promoting new updates to its brand safety tools. While Instagram is an important destination for online shoppers, it is also a common place for product infringement. Brand Rights Protection expands to Instagram the ability for merchants to search for and report infringements on their IP — previously available only for advertisements, in sale posts from shops, marketplace and buy/sell groups.

As e-commerce continues to grow, digital sales are expected to hit between $210 and $218 billion this holiday season, up from $189 billion last year, Deloitte estimates. Yet despite this outlook, consumers still have reason to distrust Facebook's offerings. To this end, the updates also seek to protect buyers from counterfeit products, which could help to strengthen trust in Facebook's merchants and its platforms — an especially important play this year as supply chain issues erode brand loyalty.

Facebook's efforts build on previous renovations to strengthen its IP-infringement tools. The social media giant also rolled out for testing earlier this year a feature that allows for safer ad placement on its apps.

The company's rivals are also making efforts to enhance brand safety ahead of the holidays. TikTok last month unveiled tools to help marketers find creators, better measure campaigns and properly disclose ad content. Google this summer adopted an email authentication protocol to protect against phishing, which is a particular problem in the holiday season.

Efforts to improve its own brand safety arrive as Facebook grapples with several controversies that have plunged the business into hot water again. In The Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" investigative report, former employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company by suggesting its complicity in creating societal harm. Soon after the report ran, an outage temporarily wiped out billions of accounts tied to Facebook's family of apps.

Amid growing frustration in the company's operations, the company is rumored to soon undergo a name change to reflect its growing interest in the metaverse, The Verge reported. While Facebook has previously demonstrated its commitment to the space through the launch of Horizon Workrooms, some experts argue the time has passed for a fresh start.