“Instagram is changing its policy and after tomorrow they own all your photos and private messages. Be sure to copy and paste this by tomorrow or it will happen to you” Did this appear over and over in your Instagram feed over the past few weeks?  These types of notes are what we would consider chain mail in 2019.   If you grew up in the era of snail mail you’ll remember getting those letters telling you to send it along to your friends and all kinds of exciting things would happen?  This is the online version of that

The best practice here would be to check in with reliable sources. Of course the most reliable of them all is to go directly to the source. Facebook and Instagram should be noted to be the most important place to check first as they will be legally obligated to let you know if any of their terms have changed.

Both Instagram and Facebook have a very comprehensive Terms of Use policy and within that you do grant Instagram some permissions, but this note is contained within part of it: 

So what does this mean? What they are saying is they do not claim to own your content, but that we have licensed them to use it.  When we upload to the platform we allow them to use, display, share the content you have created.  You can end the agreement any time by cancelling your account.

Instagram just suddenly owning all of your content is simply not legal without a giant change to the Terms of Use…and you as an Instagram user would have to agree to it. Many people don’t read through all the terms of use within and just click through to the end, but if you read through you will see that you are covered. 

Some reliable sites to check include Later.com and socialmediatoday.com and as mentioned above, the actual social media sites as well!

If you ever see a post telling you that you need to repost for legal purposes, stop for a second and think.  Realize that Aunt Suzy’s Instagram account isn’t the place to look for authoritative information.  While these posts seem harmless, they also let certain undesirable people know that you might fall for other larger scams, and we don’t want that!   

We will do all we can moving forward to keep you updated on any changes to all our favourite social media platforms.  Always rely on industry experts to keep you up to date on anything like this and don’t fall for the post and repost scams! 

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