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.
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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.
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In April 2016, Instagram released a Windows 10 Mobile app, after years of demand from Microsoft and the public to release an app for the platform. Since the app’s launch it had used the Foursquare API technology to provide named location tagging. Britain’s Office of Fair Trading approved the deal on August 14, 2012, and on August 22, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. closed its investigation, allowing the deal to proceed. On April 9, 2012, Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms) bought Instagram for $1 billion (equivalent to $1,346,000,000 in 2024) in cash and stock, with a plan to keep the company independently managed. On April 3, 2012, Instagram released a version of its app for Android phones, and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day.
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While Instagram has a neutral gender-bias format, 68% of Instagram users are female and 32% are male. As of 2014update, Instagram’s users are divided equally, with 50% iPhone owners and 50% Android owners. This increased to 150 million in January 2017, 200 million in April, surpassing Snapchat’s user growth, and 250 million active users in June 2017. In October 2016, Instagram Stories reached 100 million active users, two months after launch.
In December 2017, Instagram began to allow users to follow hashtags, which display relevant highlights of the topic in their feeds. On March 1, 2021, Instagram launched a new feature named Instagram Live Rooms, which lets four people go live together. In November, Instagram began to support Alt text to add descriptions of photos for the visually impaired. In September 2011, a new version of the app included new and live filters, instant tilt–shift, high-resolution photographs, optional borders, one-click rotation, and an updated icon.
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- On September 3, 2025, Instagram launched a native iPadOS app, which before relied on the iOS app and did not utilize the larger screen size of tablets.
- Importantly, this feature will only display Story Highlights—curated collections of Stories saved by users—rather than standard Stories that disappear after 24 hours.
- The research findings suggested that user motivations and socio-psychological predictors influence people’s usage behaviours with Instagram Reels.
- In June 2017, Instagram announced that it would automatically attempt to filter offensive, harassing, and “spammy” comments by default.
- Later in May, TechCrunch reported about tests of a Location Stories feature in Instagram Stories, where public Stories content at a certain location are compiled and displayed on a business, landmark or place’s Instagram page.
- In May 2021, Instagram began allowing users in some regions to add pronouns to their profile page.
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. At the time of the announcement, it was reported that 80% of Instagram’s 600 million users were located outside the U.S., and while the aforementioned functionality was live at its announcement, Instagram also announced its intention to make more features available offline, https://www.cuscocasinoonline.nl/ and that they were “exploring an iOS version”.
- The leak included presentations seen by company executives, and the findings mentioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.
- Then, the following month, Reels officially launched in 50 countries including the United States, Canada and United Kingdom.
- On July 5th, 2023, Meta launched Threads, a social network platform connected to Instagram that allows users to make public shortform blog posts comprising text, photos, and videos, as well as to converse with other users and reblog other users’ posts.
- 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.
- The move garnered severe criticism from users, prompting Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom to write a blog post one day later, announcing that they would “remove” the offending language from the policy.
- The system is built using a Facebook-developed deep learning algorithm known as DeepText (first implemented on the social network to detect spam comments), which utilizes natural-language processing techniques, and can also filter by user-specified keywords.
A camera inside Direct lets users take a photo and send it to the recipient without leaving the conversation. The feature received a major update in September 2015, adding conversation threading and making it possible for users to share locations, hashtag pages, and profiles through private messages directly from the news feed. These researchers found that college students in the U.S. and China watch short-form videos for entertainment, knowledge, and to build social identities. A Meta spokesperson explained, “We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended. We apologize for the mistake.” 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. Users can also view statistics on their videos and see other user’s videos that are trending in the Inspiration tab.
On October 6, 2010, the Burbn Beta iOS app was made available through the App Store, though this was still just a prototype only. On October 21, 2009, the first web-based prototype of Burbn was released online, although it was basic and non-functional, it featured a registration waiting list. 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. Instagram began development in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.
She said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September 2013 that the company should be ready to begin selling advertising by September 2014 as a way to generate business from a popular entity that had not yet created profit for its parent company. Instagram verifies accounts based on its own discretion, and not all accounts meeting the criteria may be verified. This marked a significant shift from the previous system where verification was typically initiated by Instagram itself for accounts it deemed to be of public interest or high-profile. Instagram introduced a verification feature, known as the blue verified badge, in December 2014. In September 2025, Instagram began testing a Reels-first user interface in India and South Korea.
Users will only be able to view these Highlights after they have gone through all current Stories in their tray, meaning that those who follow many accounts may find it challenging to see these updates. They appear as circles below the profile picture and biography and are accessible from the desktop website as well. In August 2023, Instagram introduced new adjustments to protect user privacy and prevent harassment and spam. After the update (which is rolled out to a segment of the user base) the Instagram Direct icon transforms into Facebook Messenger icon. Meta issued a public apology, stating that a technical error led to the unintended recommendation of such content.
In April 2012, Facebook acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. The app received around 25,000 registrations that day, though it remained a public beta. The Burbn Beta app was made available for iOS on October 6, 2010, by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — still as a prototype, but for the first time available as a real app on the App Store rather than a web-based prototype.
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.