A tale of two Iniesta’s
One Iniesta is a normal bloke from Madrid, a designer for a marketing agency, the other is a World Cup, European Cup, Champions League (4X!) and La Liga champion – the best playmaker of his generation, the scorer of that goal etc. However, the original Iniesta does have one up on him. Iniesta from Madrid is the original owner of the @ainiesta Instagram handle.
On Wednesday morning, the designer from Madrid found that his Instagram had been inexplicably deleted. The company cited that he had infringed their terms of use. Shocked, he scoured the document trying to find out what he might have possibly done to deserve having his account deleted.
Confused friends and family
Later that day his friends started seeing images and videos coming from the Spain and Barcelona midfielder. They weren’t expecting to see their friend taking part in promotional exercises as well as training with Lionel Messi and informed him of the link.
He found nothing, so he contacted the official Instagram Twitter handle but didn’t receive a response so the next day he got in touch with the @instagramhelp account…
No response
Andres Iniesta from Madrid decided to vent his frustration with a community post on Medium, the insta-blogging site. The post blew up and went viral. It seemed that the digital community were disgusted with Instagram’s move to replace an existing user’s legitimate account with that of a sports star.Iniesta added fuel to the fire by writing on his Medium post:
“What pains me is that all of this has happened without any explanation, not even a twitter response from Instagram. I’m not a celebrity, and I don’t want to be one. I just don’t like things being taken away from me.”
Instagram’s u-turn
However, after seeing the post on Medium and the results of the social backlash, Instagram decided to return Andres Iniesta’s account to him. The Barcelona footballer was moved to @andresiniesta8.
These kind of actions show how important celebrities are to certain social platforms. The rapid rise in Instagram’s growth surely has something to do with it being synonymous with the 21st century’s social elite (Models, Celebrities and Kardashians). It will be interesting to see if the App continues its stellar growth over the next few years (it holds the record for the fastest growing app of all-time).