The questionable new ways to surveil your friends

(upbeat music) - Tatyana, have you ever used an Instagram feature for something other than its intended purpose? - You know, not to be holier than thou. I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say that I use the platform as intended. I think maybe the shadiest thing I've ever done is like remove somebody from my close friends because I'm like, you're a close friend, but not that close, not for this topic, honey. So, I'm gonna be honest. Instagram doesn't always feel good to use, but whether it's for professional development or to increase your dating prospects, people feel like they have to use it. For me, I miss the old Instagram when you could post a meme and go on about your day. Now, to me at least, it can feel kind of like walking through a mall. Like there's hundreds of brands trying to sell you something and maybe just maybe you might run into someone you know on the way out. Now, even though I wouldn't consider myself like the IG diva, I know from your lovely posts about the show that many of you are daily users. So that means you might know about Instagram plus. According to meta, Instagram plus is a monthly subscription that unlocks exclusive features designed to deepen your friendships, give you more control over your experience and let you express yourself in new ways. These features range from cute and emoji reactions on posts to controlling how, when, for how long, and who sees your Instagram content? All for the minimal monthly price of $3.99. Now, I'll just step forward and be the first to say that I am not really planning on using these features, but I figure many of you are considering it and some may be using them already. And it may be curious about what these features say about the way we engage with each other online. So to dive into the anxious impulses, some of these features may be playing on, I invited Tatum Hunter, writer and journalist covering digital privacy and internet culture back to the show. Welcome back to it's been a minute, Tatum. Thank you so much for having me. Hello, hello, I'm Brittany Loose and you're listening to it's been a minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. And a reminder, if you love it's been a minute, which from the sweet comments y'all have been leaving, it sounds like maybe you do. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. That way you get new episodes the moment they drop. What was your reaction when you saw the features added with Instagram plus? This is a lot of stuff for $3.99 a month. - I was not shocked, I was not surprised. I think that if you are working on the product side of a social media company, you see all the insights and all the data about how people use the app, both in ways that you've built for it to be used and in ways that it wasn't built to be used. So some of these features that you're saying might lend themselves to people's more anxious impulses about their friendships, their relationships, the way they present themselves. I think there are ways that people have already been using the app that on the back end, Meta can see and then acknowledge with a collection of new features like this. - So it's like they're responding to their user base, basically. - Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of these features are addressing things people were clearly already doing on Instagram, as well as you know that Meta's gonna notice like a third party app that pops up, claiming to let people peek behind the scenes and see who follows and unfalows them, who's stalking them, who views their stories the most, et cetera. - Oh, it's kind of like a desire path. For those of you who don't know, it's could be ever been to like a public park or a university campus or something like that where there's like usually all this beautiful lawn and then sometimes there's these little paths that are just worn from people wanting to get from point A to point B in the quickest fashion. They're not official paths, they are a desire path to the path that you wanna take. And it sounds like with sort of the way that Instagram users were engaging with the app, they were kind of finding ways to sort of like get them through the back door to create the feature that they wanted and now Instagram is like, "Hey, I'll give this to you for a fee." - Exactly, Instagram says, "I see you scrolling through your story views for an hour to find that one person to see if they looked at your story. I'm gonna give you what you clearly want, which is a search bar to look for this person." So I don't think they're forcing these features upon us, right? - Yeah. There's people that want them. - Mm-hmm. I think it definitely goes back to what you mentioned about Instagram kind of becoming this unofficial dating app or this addition to your official dating apps where a lot of these features behind the paywall and Instagram plus, I think do have some connection to dating romance and relationships. - Hmm, okay, so I wanna talk a little bit more about these new features. Let's go down the list. Can you tell me which of these features might give you pause as a tech reporter that covers interpersonal surveillance, okay? So there's super hearts. What is that? - My understanding of super hearts is that it creates some sort of animation. So it's like, it's like liking a story, but bigger and better. - It sounds kind of like super like from the dating app Tinder. It's like, you're trying to really show somebody that you want their attention and that you're really feeling them or whatever. - That's such a good point. Kind of another dating app oblique connection there. - Interesting. Okay, like how do you feel about that from like a privacy perspective? - I'm gonna say green light. Let's all celebrate each other with as many animations and exploding hearts as we desire. - I'm actually into that. I've been sending people fire emojis. I only recently found out that some people read into that as like romantic overture and I'm like, oh, I didn't know this. - Whoops. - Whoops, exactly. What about multiple story audiences? What is that all about? - Ooh, okay, I'm gonna give this one a red light. - Oh. - Not for privacy reasons, but for pure shadiness reasons. (laughing) You know, regular Instagram offers one option for sharing a story with an audience other than your general audience. It's called Close Friends. You build a list of people that you can share directly to them on your story. Only they will see it. The rest of your followers will not. And what people will occasionally do if they're feeling particularly unhinged is they will put one person perhaps like their crush on a close friend's list and then share something sexy, maybe something kind of intimate, some sort of honey pot or dangling carrot for their crush. - Oh, and making it seem like it's not just for that person. You're just like, oh, this is me being casually sexy. Like people are basically whittling their close friends down to one person. You know, the object their desire is the close friend and then they had to be at everybody else. Is that what people were doing? - Exactly, imagine the person hours that have gone into whittling and then rebuilding your close friends list if you are experimenting with this. So having multiple options for, you know, private lists of friends could really open the door to some true high jinks as far as presenting one version of yourself in your life, you know, to one or more people and a totally different version to a different set. So of course, is that inherently bad? No, but it definitely, you know, there's some potential for some serious shadiness. - Yeah, so serious drama. I also feel like it's one of the things that I'm like, oh, it's only a matter of time before like a high profile person really royally screws one of those up. - Oh, oh my god, it's gonna be a senator and it's gonna be next week. (laughs) Okay, okay, what about story preview, what is that? - So that's the ability to glance at someone's story without it showing them that you've seen it. So normally if you post something to Instagram stories, it comes with the list of all the people, followers and otherwise who have looked at it. So if you're stalking your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend on Instagram, maybe you want to watch her stories, but you would be quite embarrassed if she saw you watching her stories. - Right. - So this is where you can long tap on the person's profile picture instead of a short tap and it will pull up a preview of the story without revealing that you've been looking. - Oh, wow, okay, what do you think about that from like data privacy surveillance perspective? - Oh, this is definitely one of my less favorites on the list. When you share something on social media, on many platforms, you don't get to see who's looking at it and we're used to that, right? - Yeah, yeah. - You're something out there, you're open to the idea that someone you don't know personally, someone you're not aware of might be looking at it. But on Instagram, we've gotten pretty used to stories being something that you have this almost gut check about, you know if someone who makes you anxious or nervous is looking at your life in a way where you'd prefer maybe to block them or not have them there. And this will make it impossible to know for sure if someone that you haven't blocked is peeking into your story. - Oh my gosh, that is, that is tricky stuff. That is really tricky stuff. I'm like, the real Instagram stalkers, you said if you're trying to exes old partner or something like that, I mean, I've never done this, but I do know that a thing people do is like have fake accounts or something like that or like so that they can follow someone surreptitiously and sort of see what they're up to. That's again, that's more than I can keep up with. But the story preview seems like it would cut through all of that. You don't have to make fake accounts anymore. You can just like get in there and sort of like have a look around and step back out without being detected. That is. What about story rewatch insights? I feel like this is one that I've heard about. This is like where you can see how long people are watching your stories and how many times or something like that. What is that? Yeah. This to me feels pretty innocuous. This feels more like a creator tool where it's it's almost like getting some sort of data about whether people are rewatching your regular content. You're learning if people are going back to see your story more than once, which means that it's resonating. And this is more of a general thing. You can't see if an individual person is rewatching your story. Okay, because I was like, wow, I thought I thought it was set up so that you could see if an individual person was going to be watching your stories, which I was like, oh, Lord, that would have the potential to tear apart the fabric of our society. Okay. And lastly, what about search viewer list? That's a feature that allows you to do what? This is where you can go through the list of people who have viewed your stories. And as it stands right now, you have to scroll through. If you're looking to see if some particular special person is watching your story, you might if you have a lot of followers, you might be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to try to spot that person's name and profile picture. This gives you a search function to just say, Hey, did Brittany look at this? And I can punch in your name and see if you're among the story viewers. Wow. Okay. So I wonder, what do these story features say about the relationship between our impulses and the way that we use Instagram. I think that as our lives, our professional lives, our social lives have migrated online in the last, you know, 15, 20 years, it creates a lot more digital touch points as we move through our lives. Right? Like if you're talking about data privacy, for example, you start looking at all the little breadcrumbs you leave around the internet. Oh, yeah. And what that has done to our especially romantic relationships, it's kind of created more digital touch points for your partner that you want to know about. Suddenly, they have this whole vector of their lives that happens online and on social media that you're not privy to in the way that you kind of would have been more so in when we are living in this totally analog world. And so it creates more, more elements of your partner's life that you don't know about or your crush's life that you don't know about. And it kind of opens the door for these more granular forms of monitoring, maybe control in the worst cases, stalking and abuse in the best cases, you know, kind of anxiety and curiosity. Coming up after the break. How on earth am I connecting more deeply with my friends by watching their stories in secret? Stick around. It's the very least what you're describing some of these possible outcomes or scenarios. It's kind of it odds with the way that meta has described the possibilities for this product, right? Like, they described it as something that's going to, you know, deepen your friendships and let you express yourself. And I'm not saying that that can't necessarily happen. But to your point, the way that our impulses and the way that we want to interact with others are sometimes want to like control or monitor what they're doing. That seems more like the sort of lowest common denominator area where people actually engage with apps like these and features like these. Absolutely. And this also doesn't just show up in our romantic relationships too. Like the last time I was on this show, we were talking about location tracking. Right. And that's something, you see, you know, super common in families with parents and kids, super common with romantic partners, but also super common in friend groups. And when I was reporting on some of the problems that happen here, friends are not immune from some forms of control and in the worst cases abuse or tension over location sharing, whether that's their willingness to location share or actually where they are and what their friends are watching them do as they move through the world. So I think that, you know, talking about our crushes and our romantic partners are probably some of the most dark examples, but it's certainly not limited to that. And we've watched Meta dip its toe into the waters of these features that pose a risk to privacy. Of course, you know, Meta's never had a great reputation for guarding its user's privacy. But for example, companies like the app life 360, like Snapchat with its snap map, Apple with its fine my friends, really normalized a feature like location sharing, which gives us really unprecedented visibility into the lives of the people around us. And we saw about a year ago, Instagram start to experiment with a real-time map where you could see your friends locations. So we notice that they see the value in these features. They're totally aware of this kind of itchy desire to know more and more and more about the lives of the people around us. And they're willing to experiment with it and build it into the app and kind of see what happens. I wonder like this makes me think about a phenomenon. I feel like that's kind of uniquely born out of these like increased tools that we have to possibly connect, possibly surveil each other. And it's very connected to I think how we use Instagram microcheating. This idea that certain behaviors like rewatching someone's Instagram story could be read as breaking trust or cheating. How can some of these features present opportunities to create chaos in our personal relationships rather than more peace? Yeah. So microcheating is a term that people have used before they were talking about internet and social media stuff. But I think it's become a lot more powerful of a term as the kind of size of these perceived betrayals get smaller and smaller and smaller. Like we all know the person who would be really pissed and offended if their partner was liking somebody else's Instagram story. If their partner was following a pretty stranger celebrity on Instagram. If their partner was commenting on a somebody, you know, maybe somebody of the opposite gender on their on their posts. Right. And so the kind of behaviors that we perceive as infidelity have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. Thus the term microcheating. And so I think that the more that a company like meta that's incentivized to increase people's time on app, increase kind of the stickiness of this app so that people come back and they watch the ads and they hang out on there. So we see them leaning into these kind of features. I think it shows that they, you know, one like we said that they see the power of these features. How much people want them. But it also does present this possibility for utter chaos and societal collapse as we, as we're given the tools to get more and more of that visibility, rather than ever having to stop and consider like what do I consider to be infidelity? What do I consider, you know, to be a liar betrayal by a friend or lover? How much should I care about this? How much should I get to see? How much do I even want to see? You know, as the company gives us more and more avenues to just kind of lean into those impulses, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to kind of stop and ponder what we want our relationships to look like in this very, very digital world. Yeah. So much of what we're talking about feels in whatever way in line with features and apps that meta as a company has rolled out in the past. They're looking back over meta's history. What are some major moments or features that kind of let us to this point where we're looking at this new slate of Instagram plus features? Oh, that's a great question. Well, I think that the Instagram map is a really good one because that was a pretty lot clear line in the sand of Instagram saying, you know, we are going to add an interpersonal tracking feature to this app. So, you know, it's not just about keeping tabs on your friends through what they actively choose to post, you can now keep tabs on your friends more passively by watching their movements on a map. So, I think the map on Instagram was a really big one. Let me think for one second in case there's other really good ones here. Close friends. You know, that the way to give people more control over how they present themselves on Instagram, and by that, I mean, being able to present yourself one way to one audience in a different way, too. different audience. Well, I think that is not a bad thing necessarily. It's another example of I think Instagram noticing the ways that people want to use the platform, which in that case was I have things that I want to say that are inappropriate for my general audience on this. And I'd like to have this power to curate what version of myself I'm showing to different audiences. I wonder like how might this change the experience of Instagram for people like myself who are regular users actually are even people who use the app more than I do, right? Who are daily users, but not paying for premium. I think that for people who already have some level of discomfort with just how Instagram operates, what kind of app it is, I think that this could totally exacerbate that where these features seem to be intended for power users. People who use Instagram for their social lives in a big way who are on there a lot who want more and more and more and I think for more casual users maybe like you now, you know, you're probably not thinking about the fact that somebody could be watching your stories and secret that somebody is searching through their story view list for your name that somebody put you on a list that only consists of you and a couple other people or removed you from a list so that they could share something they didn't want you to see. It's like, you're not thinking about it unless you're thinking about it. So it does kind of create this, this like to strata of people on Instagram. And I think that these, you know, none of these features are going to, you know, like break our social contract in some unfixable way. But I do, I do think that it widens the gulf between between maybe even younger people who use Instagram as a primary way to connect socially and people who don't use it that way. Yeah, Meta says that these features are meant to quote deep in your friendships among users. Do premium membership tiers actually deepen connection on Instagram or even on other apps? This is an opinion, but to me, it is crazy work for Meta to describe these features as a way to more honestly express yourself and connect with others when some of them are just explicitly like surreptitious how on earth am I connecting more deeply with my friends by watching their stories in secret? Fair, fair, fair. I think that, you know, this company cannot reasonably say, hey, we've rolled out this suite of premium features because we see you creepy little weirdos, we see everything you do. And we're, and we're going to, you know, build, build features to, to kind of legitimize and empower some of the, some of the shadier ways that people use this platform. I, I mean, I also wonder too, like on a broader point about membership tiers, right? There are plenty of people that pay for the membership tier experience of different kinds of apps, whether they are social media apps, like ones we're talking about, or dating apps, which are in a way, almost a different form of social media app when you really think about like how the app companies want you to interact. They want you to stay on, you know, I mean, the app at interacting with it as long as possible, right? It's not that different from, you know, a platform like Facebook or, uh, or, you know, Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or whatever. I wonder in what ways might membership tiers on social media platforms be stratifying our social media experience? And what does that either reflect or what could possibly affect about our actual world? Hmm, I think that to understand that or to answer that, it's important to pull the camera back to the consumer tech industry at large and some of the patterns that we've seen over the last decade or so. Uh, you've had Cory Doctoro on the show. Yes, we have had him on and he talked about his concept that we can't say the title of right now, but it's basically this pattern of digital platforms and services declining over time as tech companies try to maximize profits at the expense of customers and their user experience. I am kind of concerned about the way that we could almost get like hoodwinked into paying money for something that should really be free because we're being advertised to so heavily. Our data is the price we pay to use a meta product. Our eyeballs on our minutes watching these ads is the price we pay. Now you want me to pay like a dollar price? I'm suspicious. Oh my gosh, Tatum, I'm like, it's interesting. I mean, I guess this is how this is meant to work, but I've like left this conversation on one hand, feeling like, okay, I'm armed with a way to think about this critically. These sorts of changes on an app that previously hasn't really had this kind of sort of painted tear in this way before. But also, I totally understand why some people are interested in this. I'm very curious to see how it catches on. Tatum, thank you so much. It's been such a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you. That was Tatum Hunter, a writer and journalist who covers digital privacy and internet culture. This episode of It's Bit A Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. This episode was edited by Nina Patuck. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Gurdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Bit A Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.