THE Health Secretary is calling on Scots to report Instagram accounts falsely claiming to belong to her.

Jeane Freeman has filed a report about one account, jeane.freemsn, while MSP Emma Harper also flagged a second fake account going by the name jeanefreaman.

Speaking to Twitter this afternoon, the MSP said: “I have been alerted to the existence of an Instagram account claiming to be my MSP account.

“It has been reported direct with Instagram.

“You can also report it too by clicking the link and filing a report. http://instagram.com/jeane.freemsn/”

It is against the social media platform’s rules to create an Instagram account pretending to be another person.

There are a few ways to spot if an account is fake – one of the first is to check the bio. The description in the jeane.freemsn Instagram account is poorly punctuated and does not capitalise the place names in her constituency or her own name – on Twitter, the Health Secretary does not make these errors.

The second red flag for this particular account is that it is private – it would be very unusual for a government official to not have a public social media account.

Also check the follower counts – the fake Jeane Freeman account was following 273 people but had just 55 followers, which again would be unusual for a high-profile government figure.

Senior government figures or celebrities will likely also have a verification tick which you can look out for.

Freeman and Harper called on people to report both of the accounts listed in the social media post.