While Instagram has always publicly been a family friendly environment, the platform has a long history of being used to distribute all sorts of pornography and other adult material (Shah 2015). While many posts have been removed, accounts closed and hashtags banned (some permanently, others temporarily), Instagram has never been able to completely remove adult material from the platform. Indeed, the eggplant emoji hashtag #
Figure 1.2. Screenshot of health warning returned with Instagram #bonespo search
The development of communities also leads to norms within these groups, ideas of acceptable practice and conduct, which might work against what other users view as appropriate, or even against Instagram’s own guidelines. As Tarleton Gillespie (2018, p. 197) argues, the way content is policed explains a lot about the power and politics behind a platform:
Content moderation is such a complex sociotechnical undertaking that, all things considered, it’s amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. Even so, as a society we have once again handed over to private companies the power to set and enforce the boundaries of appropriate public speech for us. That is enormous cultural power held by a few deeply invested stakeholders, and it is being done behind closed doors, making it difficult for anyone else to inspect or challenge.
Instagram’s insistence on describing their more than a billion users as a singular community, with one set of rules to govern that entire community, means that the diversity of users and specific contexts of communication and content sharing are often lost. While chapter 5 outlines some of the very diverse communities that flourish and connect on Instagram, the boundaries established by Instagram’s content moderation and removal policies mean that other groups and other communities have either dived deeper into Instagram, beyond hashtags and public accounts, or have moved to other visual social media platforms altogether.
Stories and Snapchat
By the beginning of 2016, Instagram’s biggest competitor in the visual social media landscape was Snapchat. Like Instagram, Snapchat’s focus was on the app experience, but unlike Instagram, and almost every other social media platform at the time, Snapchat focused on content which disappeared. Snapchat’s ‘Snaps’ were content which, after being viewed, were removed from the app. Snapchat can be understood as part of a new type of social media platform which is underpinned by the appeal of ephemerality, or the notion that communication in the form of photos, visuals and video is not permanent but can disappear either immediately or after 24 hours (Bayer et al. 2016). Ephemerality is a significant shift since previous understandings of social media positioned permanence of communication as one of their defining features (boyd & Ellison 2007). Snapchat had huge appeal to the lucrative teen market, and quickly challenged Instagram for the youth market. Indeed in 2013, Snapchat very publicly rejected an offer of US$3 billion from Facebook to buy the platform (Ask 2013), the same year that Snapchat introduced Stories, a new type of sharing where users can post images and video in (up to) ten-second chunks which can be viewed for 24 hours from their initial posting.
Communication scholar Oren Soffer (2016) argues that Snapchat’s ephemerality is ‘the counter-logic of new media information aggregation’. For Soffer, ephemeral applications return to an oral paradigm of communication, where the visual is now a disappearing utterance (thus more oral than textual in nature). This inability to store and archive the message (or ‘Snap’) changes the nature of the communication process. Or, as Professor of Digital Culture Jill Walker Rettberg (2018, p. 192) succinctly puts it, ‘Snapchat is a conversation, not an archive.’ Equally important, the ephemeral nature of this conversation means that more users tend to pay more focused attention to these exchanges as they know they’re unable to return to them (Bayer et al. 2016). Thus, in Snapchat, Instagram had a competitor that was capturing both the conversation, and attention, of one of their most prized demographic groups.
While mainstream press reporting made Snapchat and sexting synonymous as soon as self-deleting social media began, almost all research has found that while sexting is certainly a minority use, the vast majority of Snapchat exchanges are far more mundane elements of everyday life, from jokes to cute kittens and beyond (Bayer et al. 2016; Roesner, Gill & Kohno 2014). However, the ephemeral or disappearing nature of Snapchat content was never as absolute as it appeared. Even when Snapchat was only Snaps (before the Stories function), it was still possible to capture a snap by taking a screenshot, and far from being a violation of privacy expectations (although clearly this would be the case in some contexts), often taking screenshots demonstrates the value of the Snap, showing the recipient valued it enough to go to more effort to capture and save it. In effect, screenshotting thus takes on a form of value and currency in seemingly ephemeral Snapchat exchanges (Handyside & Ringrose 2017). Given the popularity of Snapchat for everyday uses and communication, it is no surprise then that Instagram adapted the format for their own.
In August 2016, Instagram launched their own Stories format and gave the new communication tool pride of place, at the top of the Instagram app. At the time of the launch, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom was perfectly happy to admit that Snapchat had pioneered the Stories format and had initially popularized it; Instagram was not reinventing the wheel, but rather adapting the already successful format and expanding it in new ways with Instagram’s users. Systrom argued that Facebook invented newsfeed, Twitter invented hashtags and now Snapchat had invented Stories, but this was a format that Instagram and others could integrate and build on (Constine 2016). Before Stories launched, users were spending less and less time on Instagram; the more polished main Instagram feed meant many people were carefully choosing images, but posting rarely, and thus checking Instagram less often. Instagram Stories immediately turned that trend around, with users spending more time on the platform, and finding in Stories a space where they could post multiple times, sometimes many times, daily. Similarly, the fact that Stories disappeared after 24 hours meant users checked in more often, so they would not miss any important material from their friends and people they follow. In reflecting on the launch of Stories, Systrom emphasized that Stories created a space where people are much more comfortable sharing, discussing and playing with all the little moments of their everyday life which do not really fit into the (often more polished) main Instagram timeline (Constine 2018c).
By 2017, the growth of Stories on Instagram was the biggest driver for Instagram’s overall success. The leaner Stories format was quickly expanded, to include options for Live Video, the inclusion of a range of filters – including the very prominent face filters popularized by Snapchat – as well as a range of other creative tools, including ‘stickers’ for text, for polls, for asking followers questions, and many other things. By the first anniversary of Stories on Instagram, there were 250 million Instagram users using Stories every single day, a number which was more than the total number of users on Snapchat at the same time. While Instagram did not, and did not claim to, invent the Stories format, the platform quickly became the most popular home for