Articles about Instagram

If you've had trouble accessing Facebook today, you're not alone. Users in the US, Europe and Asia struggled to access not only Facebook, but also the WhatsApp and Instagram services owned by the social media giant.

Facebook has said little about this incident which comes just a month after it suffered its worst outage ever, causing problems for users for over 24 hours. This weekend's outage led to #FacebookDown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown hashtags trending on Twitter, and numerous reports of problems were posted to Downdetector.

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My name is Jason Kingdon, social media addict and Founder and CEO of BOLDFISH. I've been Facebook free for three years now, but I can't seem to separate it from my life. Wherever I go, there it is. Sign in with Facebook or follow us for more. At networking events, new contacts are incredulous and offended when I state my lack of social media. He lies, their eyes read. 

Some of my friends have acclimated to just texting me, but others have fallen out of touch. I've become accustomed to the "OMG! How are you!? I haven't seen you in forever! Are you still in China?" It’s as though time had frozen since the last time we made contact. There are amazing memories from pictures and status updates, yet they assume that what they consume is all that there ever was or will be.

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Often, our social media engagements seem like little more than momentary diversions. Someone might scroll through Twitter when sitting in a waiting room or browse Facebook over breakfast. These time commitments feel small in the moment, to the point of being insubstantial -- but over time, these "insubstantial" moments on social media add up. The average person spends almost two hours on social media every day, while the average teenager spends up to nine hours. One study suggests that most people will end up spending more than five years of their lives on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.

Social media is eating up a lot of your time. While not all of that time is "wasted" -- it’s possible to learn things on social media, network with valuable connections, catch up with friends, and follow important news stories -- five years of your life is a big ask. Have you ever considered deleting your social media accounts? In this article, we’ll explore how to delete your accounts, whether going dark can affect your job prospects, and what you can do instead to limit your social media usage or online exposure.

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The "praise, support and representation" of both white nationalism and white separatism are to be explicitly banned on Facebook and Instagram. The new policies will be enforced as of next week.

Facebook announced the change in policy as it and other social networks face increasing pressure to do more to counter hate speech. It also comes in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooting, footage of which was shared on the platform.

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The German cartel office, the Bundeskartellamt, has imposed new restrictions on how Facebook processes the data it gathers about users of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Germany's antitrust watchdog has hit the social network with a ban on combining user data it gathers from different sources, unless it has explicit consent from users. While Facebook is still free to gather data about Instagram users and WhatsApp users, this data cannot be automatically combined with data gathered via a users' Facebook account.

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The head of Instagram has announced plans to introduce "sensitivity screens" in the wake of concerns about the spread of photos of self-harm on the image-based social network.

Adam Mosseri says that Instagram will use image-blurring similar to that used on Facebook to hide graphic content. The move comes in the wake of the suicide of a British teenager, the parents of whom said self-harm images on Instagram were a contributing factor.

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Like Google constantly launching and closing services, the appalling disparate mess of apps produced by Facebook is something of an industry joke. Mark Zuckerberg is well-aware of this, and it seems he wants to do something about it.

Insiders at the company say plans are afoot to change the way Facebook Messenger, WhastApp and Instagram function, unifying their messaging system for better integration. On top of this, Zuckerberg also wants each of the three messaging services to feature end-to-end encryption.

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Instagram users around the world were briefly thrown into a mixture of confusion, delight and anger today when timelines switched to a new horizontal scrolling mode.

Greeted by a message that Instragram was "Introducing a New Way to Move Through Posts", users found that they could now tap to scroll through their feed horizontally. This is something that Instagram is known to have been testing for a little while now, but it seems that today's rollout was entirely accidental -- albeit one that gave a tantalizing glimpse into the future. The company has now reverted feeds to the familiar verticals scrolling mode, blaming the temporary change on a bug.

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It’s a fair bet that we’d never have heard of Facebook, Instagram, Google and WhatsApp if the internet hadn’t been invented, but London-based graphic designer Thomas Ollivier has put his skills into re-imagining how some of today’s top tech brands might have looked in the pre-internet days of the 1980s.

The collection of images, which he’s titled Re:Birth, provides a fun glimpse into how technology has changed in the past 30 years. And boy has it changed.

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Facebook is borrowing more features from Instagram and will be pushing a Facebook Messenger update to users starting today. The camera-focused update sees the arrival of not only a new selfie mode, but also support for Boomerang looping videos and AR stickers.

The update is heavily inspired by Instagram, to the point that the new Selfie mode that automatically blurs backgrounds is practically identical to Instagram's Portrait mode.

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Instagram has announced the rollout of Close Friends, a feature that makes it possible to create a list of people with whom you'd like to share Stories. This is very different to the current approach which sees Stories shared with everyone.

The feature has been beta tested for nearly a year and a half and is now ready for primetime. Rolling out to iOS and Androind in the coming days, the new feature will be welcomed by those who had concerns about privacy on Instagram.

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In recent years there have been concerns about the influence it is possible to exert over election results through social media. As well as fears relating to fake news and misinformation, there have also been calls for greater transparency when it comes to revealing the funding of political advertising.

To address some of these concerns, Facebook has announced that any ads running in the UK that make reference to political figures will have to publicly reveal the identity of the organization or individual that paid for them. The new rules about transparency will apply to both Facebook and Instagram.

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Six years after their company was bought by Facebook, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have resigned. The pair say they are "planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again".

But while the departures have been presented as being amicable, sources suggest that the resignations came about because of Systrom and Krieger's unhappiness at the direction in which Facebook was taking the app.

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While getting a verified account is something that's usually associated with Twitter, other social media services have similar schemes -- Facebook, for instance. The latest to join the verification party is Instagram which is now giving users the option of applying for a verified badge.

It is possible for anyone to request to have their account verified, but only a handful of applicants are likely to be accepted. Instagram has outlined details of how to apply, and the criteria that need to be met.

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It might seem counter-intuitive -- or it might seem like a case of just saying what it thinks people want to hear -- but Facebook doesn't want you to use it as much as you do. That's not to say it wants you to disappear entirely, rather it just hopes that the time you spend on the social network is more "intentional, positive and inspiring" -- so you don't feel compelled to stay away and miss out on all those ads!

Today, the company launches a new activity dashboard for both Facebook and Instagram that lets you see how long you've on the social networks, set time limits, and restrict notifications. Facebook says that the new tools have been created in conjunction with mental health organizations and they come amid growing concerns about the problem of social networking addiction.

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