Vatican asks Instagram to investigate ‘like’ on model’s racy photo
Someone needs to go to confession.
The Vatican has some questions for Instagram as part of their probe into a devilish “like” from the official account of Pope Francis on a photo of a half-naked Brazilian model, a report said Thursday.
Last week, model Natalia Garibotto cheekily declared she was “going to heaven” after she was blessed with the like from the Holy See, but the Vatican has denied the endorsement came from Francis and later “unliked” the photo after reporters started asking questions.
“We can exclude that the ‘like’ came from the Holy See, and it has turned to Instagram for explanations,” a Vatican spokesperson told the Guardian of the probe.
The precise time an image is liked wouldn’t be clear from the pope’s account — his team can view all posts that have been liked but not the time they were marked.
But that crucial detail could reveal who was behind the unofficial endorsement of the model’s bare-bottomed photo because the pope’s various social media accounts are run by a team, the Guardian reported. Therefore, whoever was on duty could be the sinful culprit.
It’s not immediately clear if the social media giant, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, will be assisting in the holy inquiry. Instagram did not immediately return a request for comment.
The pope’s Instagram account, which boasts 7.4 million followers, doesn’t follow any other users, so whoever liked the photo would have had to actively seek out Garibotto’s page.
Robert Mickens, the editor of the English-language edition of the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix, told the outlet there is no way the pope was behind the like.
“The pope is not like Donald Trump, he’s not sitting around using his phone or computer to tweet all day long … He does, for example, approve the tweets — but not the likes — and on very rare occasions he has said he would like to tweet something because of a developing situation or emergency,” the Rome-based papal expert explained.
“So he would have nothing to do with this — it’s the communications department, and how this happens … who knows.”