Although often admired for its success and influence, Instagram has also been criticized for negatively affecting teens‘ mental health, its policy and interface changes, its alleged censorship, and illegal and inappropriate content uploaded by users. 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. The photo post had received three likes and countless comments, and in September 2017, the company’s algorithms turned the photo into an advertisement visible to Solon’s sister. The policy change and its backlash caused competing photo services to use the opportunity to „try to lure users away“ by promoting their privacy-friendly services, and some services experienced substantial gains in momentum and user growth following the news.
Users can upload photographs and short videos, follow other users‘ feeds, and geotag images with the name of a location. This feature allows users to share updates as short text posts of up to 60 characters with certain people, who can then reply to them using messaging on Instagram. During Facebook F8, it was announced that Instagram would, beginning in Canada, pilot the removal of publicly displayed „like“ counts for content posted by other users. Realizing that it was too similar to Foursquare, they refocused their app on photo-sharing, which had become a popular feature among its users.
- In May 2021, Instagram announced a new accessibility feature for videos on Instagram Reels and Stories to allow creators to place closed captions on their content.
- Subsequent episodes in June and August 2024 featured Reneé Rapp, Rachel Sennott, Megan Thee Stallion and GloRilla.
- After scrolling through posts from the past 48 hours, Instagram displays posts related to their interests from accounts they do not follow.
- The video only contained fan-submitted Instagram photographs that used various filters to represent words or lyrics from the song, and over 1,200 different photographs were submitted.
- In 2019, Apple pulled an app which let users stalk people on Instagram by scraping accounts and collecting data.
- 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.
Digital rights groups such as 7amleh and Access Now argue that the removal of Palestinian content reflects broader issues of digital discrimination and have called for greater transparency from social media platforms. Instagram denied intentional censorship and attributed the deletion of Palestinian posts to glitches. On January 2020, after the Assassination of Qasem Soleimani by the United States, Instagram removed posts expressing support for General Soleimani.
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- Josh Riedel joined the company in October as Community Manager, Shayne Sweeney joined in November as an engineer, and Jessica Zollman joined as a Community Evangelist in August 2011.
- However, in December 2021, Adam Mosseri, in a Senate hearing on child safety issues, stated that the company is developing a version of the feed that would show user posts in chronological order.
- Despite the „TikTokification“ of Reels and the parent company Meta spending millions on courting content creators, user engagement continued to lag way behind TikTok as of 2022.
- 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 June 2011, it announced that it had 5 million users, which increased to 10 million in September.
- The company stated it was looking into concerns raised by the regulators and parents.
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. IGTV allows uploads of up to 10 minutes in length with a file size of up to 650 MB, with verified and popular users allowed to upload videos of up to one hour in length with a file size of up to 5.4 GB. Instagram offers a number of photographic filters that users can apply to their images.
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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. Additionally, users can now reply to private messages with text, emoji or by clicking on a heart icon. When users receive a private message from someone they don’t follow, the message is marked as pending and the user must accept to see it. The rapid and easily consumable nature of short-form videos can elicit high levels of dopamine; since dopamine serves as a motivator rather than a direct source of pleasure, individuals are compelled to seek rewarding activities and become addicted to them. According to Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and chief of Stanford University’s dual diagnosis addiction clinic, brief attention-grabbing videos act as powerful stimuli triggering dopamine surges akin to other addictive behaviors.
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. Research shows Instagram browsing predicts social comparison, which generates FOMO, which can lead to depression. However, Brailovskaia & Margraf 2018 found a significant positive relationship between Instagram membership and extraversion, life satisfaction, and social support. Comments related to appearance on Instagram can lead to higher dissatisfaction with one’s body.
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This grew to 150 million in August 2011, and by June 2023, there were over 50 billion photos uploaded to the service. After being released in October 2010, Instagram had one million registered users in December 2010. The study reported evidence of online posts affecting offline behavior, but stopped short of claiming causality.
In 2021, Instagram announced that like counts would return to be publicly viewable by default. If some of the accounts violate Instagram’s community guidelines, it will take action, which could include banning them. 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.
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Lub & Trub 2015 showed that following more strangers increases social comparisons and depressive symptoms. 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. Instagram caused the userbase to fall into outrage with the December 2018 update.
Internet users who make less than $30,000 per year use Instagram, while 14% of those making $30,000 to $50,000 and 12% of users who make more than $50,000 per year do so. Instagram has been proven to attract the younger generation, with 90% of its 150 million users under the age of 35. While Instagram may appear to be one of the most widely used sites for photo sharing, only 7% of daily photo uploads, among the top four photo-sharing platforms, come from Instagram.
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. The tab was updated in June 2015 to feature trending tags and places, curated content, and the ability to search for locations. Instagram said that this is to prevent abuse and so that hashtags do not help users gain views, but it has been noted that using hashtags is the only free method for a user to reach past their existing followers. In 2022 this was again tested on some users, and in April 2023 the ability to search recent hashtags was removed entirely.
In June 2017, Instagram announced that it would automatically attempt to filter offensive, harassing, and „spammy“ comments by default. Meta representatives replied that they were disappointed with the lawsuit and were hoping instead to continue working with other companies from the industry to create new and better standards for applications teens use. The lawsuit claimed that Meta and its Instagram unit repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms and knowingly induced young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use. In October, 2023, 42 U.S. states https://www.cuscocasinoonline.nl/ filed a lawsuit against Instagram and parent company Meta, accusing them of contributing to a youth mental health crisis due to the addictive nature of the platforms.
Their study showed presence of depressive symptoms in a user could positively predict they would post. Khodarahimi & Fathi 2017 found evidence users displayed higher levels of depressive and anxious symptoms compared to non-users. 13% of British and 6% of American teenager users with suicidal thoughts could trace them to Instagram use.
