Articles about Instagram

Meta recently announced that the protection, privacy and security offered by end-to-end encryption will not be coming to Facebook Messenger or Instagram until some time in 2023. Until then, anyone looking to send secure messages through Meta's platform will have to turn to WhatsApp.

What was not made particularly clear at the time of the announcement, however, is just why there is such a delay. Now Meta has opened up and revealed some of the thinking behind holding back on the roll-out of end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging services.

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WhatsApp users may enjoy the benefits of end-to-end encryption, but the same cannot be said of messages sent via Facebook or Instagram. What's more, this is not going to be changing any time soon.

While Meta (or Facebook as it was at the time) previously announced plans to introduce encrypted messaging to the Facebook and Instagram platforms, there was heavy criticism from campaigners and organizations for child safety. Now the company has said end-to-end encryption will not be arriving until 2023.

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In October, the internet was shaken by the Facebook outage that affected dozens of big-name companies, as well as millions of brands and businesses that advertise on Facebook’s platform. Because of something as simple as a misconfigured Domain Name System (DNS) record, every device with the Facebook app integration started DDoS-ing recursive DNS resolvers -- DDoS meaning "Distributed Denial of Service." This, in turn, caused overloading in countless cases across the board.

You might be thinking to yourself, "So, what? A few sites were offline for a couple of hours." But the outage brought to light other issues. Communications for the very Facebook employees that could fix this issue were crippled. Some of these hindrances went so far that people were unable to enter buildings because the physical badge system wasn't even online.

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Almost a decade after killing off support for previews of Instagram posts within tweets, Twitter and Instagram have finally made friends, relented and decided to bring the feature back.

The reappearance of Twitter Card previews is something that will be welcomed by people who cross-post between Instagram and Twitter. It comes as great news for anyone who was irritated by Instagram's decision to stop displaying previews of tweeted content back in 2012.

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History will treat Monday and Tuesday as days the tech world would love to forget. 

Monday was Black Monday for those who rely on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All of these Facebook-owned properties went down for around eight hours, leaving a lot of people confused and services such as Twitter booming with the extra traffic. This was a critical outage that even affected Facebook employees and their internal systems, making it impossible for many people at Facebook to use anything they needed to get their jobs done. 

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Sex and gender are two different things. For many people, these match. Using myself as an example, I was born biologically male and identify my gender as such. I prefer to be called "him" and "he." For some other people, however, their gender does not match their sex. And yes, despite what some ignorant people may think, this is absolutely factual -- sex is biology while gender is a social construct.

This is why you really can't assume someone's gender or pronouns. Just because someone looks to you like they are biologically female, for instance, that doesn't mean the person wants to be referred to as "she" or "her." Heck, some people identify as a gender that is neither male or female. In theory, there are infinite genders -- and infinite pronouns.

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I’m no Trumper. This prediction has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how social media actually works. Following the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6th, President Trump was bumped from nearly all social media, even YouTube, with many of those changes subsequently made permanent. These moves led to speculation that Trump would be hobbled without his beloved accounts, his immediate impact on public discourse muted without the ability to tweet. While this may be true in the very immediate sense, it won’t last. Even Trump, the technical luddite, will figure it out and roar back shortly with or without those accounts.

This prediction is very similar in thinking to a column I wrote last August -- President Trump thinks he can shut down WeChat: It won’t work. That column made the simple point that such bans are hard to make stick, even for a U.S. President, simply because of the international nature and foreign hosting of the WeChat service.

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If you've logged into Facebook, launched Instagram, or fired up Facebook Messenger recently, you may well have seen a message reading, "some features not available". So, what's going on?

Various restrictions have come into force because of new privacy laws that Facebook must comply with. It means that some "advanced options", such as creating polls, are no longer available to millions of users. Facebook has revealed just what is happening.

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Facebook has acquired GIPHY, the GIF-making and sharing service. Although full details have not been officially revealed, the deal is estimated to have cost the social networking giant in the region of $400 million.

The main plan for Facebook is to integrate GIPHY into Instagram, but there will also be further integration into other Facebook services such as WhatsApp and Messenger.

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It's no secret that Facebook gathers staggering amounts of information about its users across its various products. This is something that many people just accept, but there is a slight discomfort in not knowing quite what is being collected.

To add a little balm to this aching fear, Facebook has announced updates to its Download Your Information tool on Facebook and Download Your Data tool on Instagram. The updates mean that while you can do little to stop Facebook from tracking you, you can at least download and see what data it is collecting about you.

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The coronavirus pandemic has people around the world searching for information about what they should and shouldn't be doing, as well as news about the spread. But there is a lot of misinformation out there, and social media platforms are breeding grounds for such harmful content to spread.

Facebook has been taking steps to counter misinformation about COVID-19, not only on the main Facebook platform, but also on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Now the company is expanding its efforts to connect people with trustworthy information about coronavirus.

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Facebook has launched a new payment service that can be used to send money and buy goods and services from within its apps -- and it's nothing to do with Libra.

The service is called Facebook Pay; it's available in the US for now, but it will expand into more countries in due course. The service allows for payments to be made in Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Given the social network's reputation for privacy, it remains to be seen whether people trust it as much as the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay.

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Being such globally recognized names, you would think that a rebranding of WhatsApp and Instagram would be a crazy exercise... but that's precisely what Facebook is doing.

In a move that is more than a little surprising -- and, many would argue, somewhat pointless -- the social networking giant is to rename the two products Instagram from Facebook and WhatsApp from Facebook. The renaming will make it clear that the company people love to hate is behind the chat and social networking tools.

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One of the key trends of the last few years has been the growth of influencer marketing via sponsored content on social media.

New research from marketing platform Socialbakers into Instagram marketing shows that in North America, influencer-sponsored posts have grown by over 150 percent from 2018 to 2019.

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With no fanfare whatsoever, Facebook has revealed that it stored the passwords for millions of Instagram accounts in plain text.

The news came as the company quietly updated a blog post from last month in which it revealed that it had stored hundreds of millions of unencrypted Facebook passwords on its servers. At the time, the company said "tens of thousands" of Instagram users were affected. Revising this figure upwards, Facebook says: "We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users".

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