I have an Instagram account and I have noticed that most of the likes I get are from the accounts of real people but that most of the likes I get are obviously automated and insincere.

Personally I find it infuriating that people do this.

Abusing the "like" mechanism is neither clever nor acceptable. It is a nuisance and it devalues the platform a lot.

Some of the photos and videos I post are mainly for myself and a few of my friends.

Some of the other videos I post because I want people from the whole world to see them.

The ones that are targeted at my friends I post with a short description and only one or two hashtags at most.

The ones that I want people from the whole world to see I add a handful of relevant hashtags to, so that people browsing those tags have a chance to see those things.

The pattern I have seen is that random accounts will randomly like previous posts of mine. Sometimes they like the sort of post that is discoverable via a popular hashtag but just as often I get likes on the images that you only find by coming to my profile -- the sort of images that is obviously of very little actual interest to anyone but myself and a few of my friends. In particular, I should say; most often these are accounts whose description state the profession of the person, and whose photos and videos tend to either revolve around that thing as well, or they post memes. Typically the profession of the person falls into one of three categories;

1. Musician. I post some music stuff and I follow some musicians. Almost certainly the people organizing the like-spamming have set it up so that if you are a musician and you ask them to like-spam for you, they have a list of other musicians with lots of followers and they use the lists of the followers of those people to find people interested in music that they can like-spam.

2. Personal Trainer.

3. Marketing person.

I report fake accounts when I see them but when it comes to the accounts of real people you only know that the majority of them are spamming but you can't know whether a single individual is like-spamming or actually leaving sincere likes.

Hence whenever I get likes from people that I don't know, I must assume that they are just spam-likes but at the same time I have no recourse.

The fact that I must assume they are all spam-likes is what devalues the likes for me.

The spam-likers have literally driven the value of a like to zero. When someone likes something I posted it should have been positive for me, but unless I know the person it's not because I know that there is an overwhelming probability that it's just another insincere fake like.

I hope that anyone and everyone partaking in the fake liking gets their account banned eventually. But if that even ever happened, which it won't, that would be so far into the future that in all likelihood I've already left Instagram for some other platform because I don't know how much longer I am going to bother maintaining a presence on Instagram.

Oh and another equally, or perhaps even more annoying thing that is being done is accounts that follow you and then some hours or days later they unfollow you. Because they never intended to follow you in the first place; they intentionally do this so that you will follow them back, hoping you will either not notice that they unfollow you or that you'll still keep following them even if you do notice. Rude!

As for what Instagram could do about this, it's not trivial but I think they could be doing more about it than they are currently. At the very least, the latter pattern of those I mentioned (frequently following and then unfollowing heaps of people) should be quite obvious to the people at Instagram if they cared.