Instagram

Instagram is introducing new measures to protect teens from sextortion, by making it harder for criminals to blackmail them.

Separately, it appears to be working on a new Social Library feature intended to make it easier to find posts you’ve shared, liked, or been sent in chat …

Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.

Some of those passwords had been unprotected since 2012, and were searchable by more than 20,000 Meta employees …

Meta has admitted to scraping all public Facebook and Instagram posts made since 2007 in order to train its generative AI model, adding to the privacy contrast with Apple Intelligence.

While the admission was made during a public enquiry in Australia, the company’s statement applies globally …

Instagram Stories, one of the most popular parts of the Instagram app today, is getting a big new feature: comments. Here are all the details you should know, including how they’re designed to help eliminate trolls.

Streaming apps like Apple Music and Spotify already provide some kind of integration with Instagram that lets users easily share the song they’re listening to in a post or Story. However, Meta and Spotify have been working on an MSN-like feature that will let Instagram users show in real time the music they’re listening to.

Meta on Tuesday announced a major update coming to Instagram and its other apps. However, rather than adding a new feature, the company is removing one. That’s because Meta has confirmed that it will be shutting down its Spark platform, which lets anyone create AR filters that can be used on the camera within apps like Instagram and Facebook.

Back in May, Meta started testing the ability to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, and the company is now rolling this out to everyone.

The feature also lets you cross-post from Facebook, continuing Meta’s integration of its three different social media platforms …

Ever wished you could share more memories on Instagram at once? Thanks to a new change rolling out today, you can: Instagram is upping the max number of photos and videos that can go in a post.

Meta this week announced new features for two of its most popular platforms: WhatsApp and Instagram. While WhatsApp is getting a new option that lets users pin their favorite chats, Instagram is adding multi-track audio to Reels.

Update: Both the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office and the European Commission have now launched investigations into the legality of making it opt-out instead of opt-in.

If you use Instagram or Facebook, Meta is using your data to train its AI models. The company uses posts as training material for its generative AI systems. Privacy legislation in the UK and European Union means that the company is forced to offer an opt-out option – but it is doing so in a rather sketchy way …

It’s no secret that Meta’s biggest source of profit comes from advertising. However, it seems that the company is willing to make advertising a bit more intrusive, at least on Instagram. That’s because Instagram has been testing a new way of showing ads that users can’t skip.

Today Instagram is rolling out a handful of enhancements to its Notes feature, including adding support for likes, mentions, and the ability to post prompts that others can respond to.

Meta is offering teenagers a strengthened version of its Instagram Limits tool. When set to its highest level, only Close Friends will be able to comment, reply, tag, mention, or message them.

It’s the latest development in the company’s protections for teens, after anti-grooming blocks and nudity blurring introduced earlier in the year …

Following a brief outage that affected most of Meta’s services last week, Instagram is down again for some users. While some people can still access parts of the app, others are reporting that the platform is entirely down this Friday.

An EU investigation has been opened into growing concerns about teen Instagram addiction, to determine whether parent company Meta is breaking the law by deliberately seeking to make its apps addictive.

The investigation will also look into whether the company’s age-verification procedures are sufficiently robust, and the phenomenon of sending users down potentially harmful ‘rabbit holes’ …

A court is being asked to decide whether or not Meta has a legal obligation to allow the use of Unfollow Everything – a browser tool which effectively empties your Facebook feed.

The idea behind the tool is that instead of being sucked into an effectively endless feed of posts from every friend, group, and page you have ever followed, you get to proactively choose the posts you read …

Update: Half an hour after publishing, TikTok Comms shared much more on X, including availability in Australia and Canada starting today.

Remember that TikTok Photos app rumor? More recently, the unreleased app has been going by the name TikTok Notes. Although the name is changed, the game is still the same: take a swing at Instagram.

Instagram is rolling out a new safety feature, designed to protect teens from being exposed to unwanted nude photos in Instagram direct messages. The system will blur nude photos in Instagram DMs when the recipient is believed to be a teenager.

The safety measure is designed to protect against three problems, including the growing problem of ‘sextortion’ on the platform …