The problem with social media is that now everyone and anyone has a voice that can be seen, heard, and read by millions around the world at a click of a button. This is great for championing certain causes and raising awareness, but it also means that the bad stuff gets its own voice and platform as well.

We now live in a world where there are people who hold jobs as social media “influencers”. Basically these are people who have a high number of followers on platforms such as Instagram, where the things they post, say, and do, have a chance of “influencing” their followers, like attending an event, buying a product, and so on.

There are many natural wonders of the world that people should explore and bask in its wonder, but unfortunately thanks to social media and the desire for “Likes”, there have been many instances of people destroying nature and artwork and desecrating ancient artifacts and places for the sake of a photo.

Instagram is a platform that is largely known for sharing photos, although the company has been making some changes to Instagram Direct where they appear to be trying to make it more of a instant messaging platform. For example users can now make video calls to other Instagram users, and now we have yet another new Direct feature.

Anyone can watch the Stories that you post on Instagram if your account is public. All of your followers can watch them if it’s private. There hasn’t been a way to post Stories for a specific group of followers, though, until now. Instagram has announced that users can make a close friends list now on Stories to share certain posts only with the people on that list.

Instagram has announced a couple of new improvements today which will make it easier for people with visual impairments to use its photo-sharing service. It recognizes that these improvements will go a long way in making Instagram more accessible to the over 285 million people across the globe who have visual impairments.

Instagram’s design has evolved over the years, and as expected of most developers, changes are constantly being made to help improve on the look and feel of the app. In fact in a post by Instagram, the company has confirmed that they are testing out some design changes to the user’s profile page where they’ll be shifting some of the UI elements around.

There are plenty of third-party services that claim to get you likes, followers, views, and more for your social media platforms in exchange for money. Many rely on these services to pump up their follower counts on Instagram in order to artificially grow their audience. Instagram is taking notice of this and the Facebook-owned company has said that it will now be removing fake followers and likes.

Earlier this year, Instagram launched a new feature that would allow users to download their data. Basically the idea behind this feature is that it lets users download all their data that they’ve published to Instagram, such as photos, videos, profile information, and more, where you can use that as a backup tool in case your account gets hacked or stolen.

These days companies are focusing on digital wellness, which is basically their way of trying to manage how much time you spend on your phone in hopes that by giving you certain tools and features, it will help curb your addiction. Back in August Instagram announced that they would rolling out an activity dashboard, and it looks like that time has finally come.

While initially positioned as a platform for users to share their photos, Instagram has never really shied away from the possibility of it being used as a platform for shopping as well. Over the years the company has introduced ways for users to shop on its platform, and now it looks like they have improved upon it further.

While marketing efforts such as running advertisements on TV and newspapers and the internet is one of the ways that you can attract new customers, a new way for restaurants to draw customers to their establishments is by creating food that is “Instagrammable”, which is basically to say that these food items look so good in photos that it makes you want to visit.

It seems that Instagram might be trying to help schools foster community spirit because according to a discovery by Jane Manchun Wong (via TechCrunch), it seems that Instagram is looking to test some kind of collaborative Stories feature for schools, where only students from a certain school can see or contribute to it.

One of the benefits of Instagram Stories is that it is temporary. This means that content that might not necessarily fit into your profile can be shared there. For example if you’re a photographer that uses Instagram as their portfolio, uploading a selfie or a photo of your lunch probably doesn’t fit the overall aesthetics that you might be going for.