Instagram has freshly announced a brand-new feature that will help ensure that traditionally underrepresented creators are properly credited for their work.

This new feature is referred to as enhanced tags and its specifically available for business and creator accounts. Enhanced tags allow people’s self-assigned profile category to appear when tagged in photos.

This means, instead of seeing an array of tagged usernames on an IG upload, users will now see tagged people’s professional titles (such as “Photographer,” “Fashion Stylist,” “Rapper,” and “Makeup Artist”), which will help highlight each creator’s contributions to the post.

“Proper creative credit and recognition is a starting point for discovery, new opportunities, and economic empowerment. For many Black and underrepresented creators, crediting is an entryway to building a sustainable career as a creator while combating cultural appropriation and ensuring the world knows who is driving culture,” Instagram representatives announced in the press release.

Engineer Camryn Boyd, an alumna of Spelman College, acknowledged how enhanced tags could help combat the troubling trend of Black creators getting overlooked or even having their work plagiarized by white influencers.

“We want to ensure that, as Black creators’ content is being distributed as it already is, they are getting the proper attribution so that they have the opportunity to get all of those growth and monetization and career-starting opportunities like their contemporaries are,” she said. “It’s really critical, as we’re moving towards this new age where creators are so important and creators are really able to use their craft to support themselves in their lives, that Black creators are getting the same opportunity, as they’re already creating the content.”

“Now, you can just have this enhanced tag, and the idea [came about] because we know that Black creators’ content was already going viral and was being shared. But they weren’t getting that attribution,” Boyd continued. “The hope is that they will now get the credit and that piece of content where their contribution can be traced back to their accounts so that people have the opportunity to follow them and [allow them to] grow their influence.”

This news comes about three months after a study found that Black influencers are paid “substantially less” than their white counterparts, as Blavity previously reported. Additionally, the announcement comes about two months after Forbes unveiled a whitewashed list of the “Top-Earning TikTok-ers” of 2022, and it’s only been mere weeks since TikTok was accused of leaving Black influencers out of a virtual meet-and-greet with Nicki Minaj.

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