Instagram has rolled out the option to publish the same content to different profiles simultaneously, allowing more flexibility to those running multiple accounts, and making it even easier for freebooters to share other people’s videos and images.

The feature gives you the option to choose multiple accounts when publishing from a mobile device. This will certainly make posting easier for users who publish similar content to different Instagram profiles, something that businesses and influencers will find useful. Freebooters will also relish the opportunity to post the exact same stolen photo or video across all of their copyright-plundering Instagram profiles.

Instagram treads a careful path between happily allowing the theft of intellectual property and promoting original content. It doesn’t offer its own native “regram” function, but certainly doesn’t stand in the way of users who wish to take other people’s photographs and videos and share them illegally. Freebooters often run multiple, near-identical accounts, and these accounts are about to become even more similar. Having seen one of my photographs posted to six accounts all selling the same, awful rock climbing merchandise, you can be sure that the problem is only going to get worse.

As TechCrunch notes, this new feature also has the potential to dilute Instagram’s quality. In the past, the social media giant’s algorithm has always rewarded original content, whereas this new feature could make feeds more homogeneous.

It’s strange to see Instagram prioritizing this new feature when other parts of the app are still dysfunctional: users still have no means of counting the number of hashtags; likes and comments are all bundled into one relatively useless stream of notifications; and the app’s system for allowing carriage returns (i.e., a new line of text) within captions seems to change by the month. If you have other gripes about Instagram (other than chronological feed — that ship has sailed), please post them in the comments below.