Turns out it’s not a pretty picture at Instagram.

The wholly owned subsidiary of Facebook (a bargain at $1 billion five years ago) is the mobile equivalent of three-ad monte, allowing sponsored posts to masquerade as genuine content.

As Gavin O’Malley wrote on MediaPost, “as its star has risen, Instagram has become a hotbed of shady marketing tactics, and influencers who specialize in blurring the line between their personal and paid-for product preferences.”

Problem #1: The Federal Trade Commission has busted about 90 Instagram influencers and told them to disclose that their posts are ads in Instaclothing.

Problem #2: Many of Instagram’s 700 million users are being bot-licked by marketers, as the New York Times’s Sapna Maheshwari reported . . .

Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.