The backlash originated from an Instagram post and Change.org petition created by photographer Tati Bruening (under the username @illumitati) on July 23, 2022, featuring the statement «Make Instagram Instagram again. (stop trying to be TikTok; i just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.». In 2019, Apple pulled an app which let users stalk people on Instagram by scraping accounts and collecting data. In December, the company began rolling out the abilities for users to turn off the comments and, for private accounts, remove followers.

Additional Benchmarks

In August, Instagram announced that it would start organizing comments into threads, letting users more easily interact with replies. Users can connect their Instagram account to other social networking sites, enabling them to share uploaded photos to those sites. This change became permanent and system wide a year later, and now hashtags can only be used to see a selection of curated content from «top» users. The same month, they also began testing the removal of ability to share feed posts to stories. After scrolling through posts from the past 48 hours, Instagram displays posts related to their interests from accounts they do not follow. Since its launch, only approximately 220,000 users globally downloaded the app, which represented less than 0.1% of Instagram’s monthly active users, indicating a lack of success in driving adoption.

The primary criticisms for these updates was that Instagram was more like TikTok than photo sharing. In 2016, Olivia Solon, a reporter for The Guardian, posted a screenshot to her vegas casino apk rummy Instagram profile of an email she had received containing threats of rape and murder towards her. On December 20, Instagram announced that the advertising section of the policy would be reverted to its original October 2010 version.

Censorship and restricted content

It was followed by the release of Hyperlapse in August, an iOS-exclusive app that uses «clever algorithm processing» to create tracking shots and fast time-lapse videos. Commission-enabled posts are labeled «Eligible for Commission» on the user side to identify them as affiliate posts. In November 2018, Instagram added the ability for business accounts to add product links directing users to a purchase page or to save them to a «shopping list». The new analytics page, known as Instagram Insights, allowed business accounts to view top posts, reach, impressions, engagement and demographic data. The company launched carousel image ads in October 2015, and video carousel ads in March 2016.

Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels is the short-form section of the American social media platform Instagram. In May 2017, Instagram once again updated the Explore tab to promote public Stories content from nearby places. The trends deemed the most popular on the platform often highlight a specific day of the week to post the material on.

Internal data from Meta

  • Initially a purely photo-sharing service, Instagram incorporated 15-second video sharing in June 2013.
  • In contrast, the level of agreement expressed in creating Instagram posts was lower, which demonstrates that Instagram’s emphasis on visual communication is widely accepted by young people in social communication.
  • In July 2014, it released Bolt, a messaging app where users click on a friend’s profile photo to quickly send an image, with the content disappearing after being seen.
  • In April 2016, Instagram added a «Videos You Might Like» channel to the tab, followed by an «Events» channel in August, featuring videos from concerts, sports games, and other live events, followed by the addition of Instagram Stories in October.

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InShot – Video Editor

In February 2023, Instagram introduced a new feature allowing users to browse and post GIFs in their comments. Similar to Snapchat, the app allowed users to communicate through messaging and video chats. Following the change, after viewing a number of posts a pop-up requires the user to log in to continue viewing content. Instagram later restricted the ability to view public profiles without logging in, prompting users to sign in after viewing a limited number of posts. In May, Instagram updated its mobile website to allow users to upload photos, and to add a «lightweight» version of the Explore tab.

More by Instagram, Inc.

In May 2017, a survey conducted by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health, featuring 1,479 people aged 14–24 and asking them to rate social media platforms depending on anxiety, depression, loneliness, bullying and body image, concluded that Instagram was the «worst for young mental health». On March 11, 2022, Russia announced it would ban Instagram due to alleged «calls for violence against Russian troops» on the platform during the ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instagram was one of the last freely available global social media sites in Iran. The Cuban government blocked access to several social media platforms, including Instagram, to curb the spread of information during the 2021 Cuban protests. Instagram has been blocked by China following the 2014 Hong Kong protests as many confrontations with police and incidents occurring during the protests were recorded and photographed. The Iranian government offered moderators bribes up to $9,000 to delete specific accounts, with Masih Alinejad being targeted in particular.

To comply with the GDPR regulations regarding data portability, Instagram introduced the ability for users to download an archive of their user data in April 2018. However, unlike post likes, the user who posted a comment does not receive notifications about comment likes in their notification inbox. On May 11, 2016, Instagram revamped its design, adding a black-and-white flat design theme for the app’s user interface, and a less skeuomorphistic, more abstract, «modern» and colorful icon. The slideshow banner on the top of profile pages, which simultaneously slide-showed seven picture tiles of pictures posted by the user, alternating at different times in a random order, has been removed. Furthermore, one row of pictures only has three instead of five photos to match the mobile layout. In June 2015, the desktop website user interface was redesigned to become more flat and minimalistic, but with more screen space for each photo and to resemble the layout of Instagram’s mobile website.

The app includes some AI features and the ability to post directly to Instagram or Facebook. The tab was later expanded again in November 2016 after Instagram Live launched to display an algorithmically curated page of the «best» Instagram Live videos currently airing. In June 2012, Instagram introduced «Explore», a tab inside the app that displays popular photos, photos taken at nearby locations, and search. Instagram encourages users to make tags both specific and relevant, rather than tagging generic words like «photo», to make photographs stand out and to attract like-minded Instagram users. In April 2018, Instagram launched its version of a portrait mode called «focus mode», which gently blurs the background of a photo or video while keeping the subject in focus when selected. The feature originally limited photos to the square format, but received an update in August to enable portrait and landscape photos instead.

Instagram has been criticized in India for not taking steps to counter homophobic and transphobic contents. Instagram-based activism (as well as other social media) has been criticized and dismissed for being performative, reductionist, and overly focused on aesthetics. In June 2020, because of the Black Lives Matter movement, Instagram became more widely used as a social justice platform.

Grok 4 Code Edition

However, new incidents of illegal drug trade have occurred in the aftermath of the 2013 revelation, with Facebook, Inc., Instagram’s parent company, asking users who come across such content to report the material, at which time a «dedicated team» reviews the information. People can’t buy things on Instagram, we are simply a place where people share photos and videos. We encourage people who come across illegal or inappropriate content to report it to us using the built-in reporting tools next to every photo, video or comment, so we can take action. In 2013, the BBC discovered that users, mostly located in the United States, were posting images of drugs they were selling, attaching specific hashtags, and then completing transactions via instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp. The company will put suggested posts ahead of posts from people who the user is following in the Instagram feed, citing positive reception as the reason for this change.

In December 2013, Instagram announced Instagram Direct, a feature that lets users interact through private messaging (colloquially called «DM» OR «DMs»; in some regions, the messages may be known simply as «direct»/»directs»). On February 26, 2025, Instagram Reels came under fire after numerous users reported a sudden surge in violent and graphic content appearing in their feeds. It functions similarly to the Chinese video service TikTok, focusing on allowing users to create short videos already set to existing sounds from other clips. Reels focuses on vertical videos that are less than 90 seconds of duration and various features for user interaction. The app automatically begins playing videos as soon as it is launched, which CEO Kevin Systrom contrasted to video hosts where one must first locate a video.

  • In January 2017, Instagram launched skippable ads, where five-second photo and 15-second video ads appear in-between different stories.
  • The most-liked photo on Instagram is a carousel of photos from footballer Lionel Messi celebrating winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup, The post has over 76 million likes.
  • Furthermore, one row of pictures only has three instead of five photos to match the mobile layout.
  • Mosseri stated that this was intended to have users «worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about.» It has been argued that low numbers of likes in relativity to others could contribute to a lower self-esteem in users.

However, Frison & Eggermont 2017 found that, among boys and girls, browsing could predict depressive symptoms; liking and posting seemed to have no effect. The company stated it was looking into concerns raised by the regulators and parents. According to the research, Instagram has a higher impact on appearance comparison than TikTok or Snapchat. The leak included presentations seen by company executives, and the findings mentioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.

Users report higher body surveillance (habitual monitoring of one’s shape and size), appearance-related pressure, eating-disorder-related-pathology and lower body satisfaction than non-users. In a 2021 study, Mun & Kim pointed out users with a strong need for approval were more likely to falsely present themselves, which increased the likelihood of depression. The first interviewed 15 monthly Californian instagram users with low body image and self esteem, aged 13-21. Suggested posts received more controversy after Fast Company stated that the feature would be impossible to turn off. The company wrote a tweet to users upset at the prospect of the change, but did not back down, nor provide a way to change it back, which they reaffirmed in 2020. In April 2016, Instagram began rolling out a change to the order of photos visible in a user’s timeline, shifting from a strictly chronological order to one determined by an algorithm.

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Users can now only receive one direct message from accounts that they do not follow, and must approve the message request before further messages can be sent. In April 2020, Direct became accessible from the Instagram website, allowing users to send direct messages from a web version using WebSocket technology. In May, Instagram made it possible to send website links in messages, and also added support for sending photos in their original portrait or landscape orientation without cropping.

According to the IFJ, Instagram is popular among Iranians because it is seen as an outlet for freedom and a «window to the world».Still, Iran has sentenced citizens to prison for posts made on their Instagram accounts. Like many social media sites, Instagram employs a combination of automated algorithms, user reports and human review to identify and remove illegal content such as child abuse and encouragement of terrorism. In contrast, the level of agreement expressed in creating Instagram posts was lower, which demonstrates that Instagram’s emphasis on visual communication is widely accepted by young people in social communication. The motives for using Instagram among young people are mainly to look at posts, particularly for the sake of social interactions and recreation. Recently Instagram has come up with an option for users to apply for a verified account badge; however, this does not guarantee every user who applies will get the verified blue tick.