The One Social-Media Feature That People Still Love
Almost every social-media platform offers its users an option to privatize their account—a way for people to control who engages with their content, often to avoid the judgment, schadenfreude, bullying, and snark that are ubiquitous online. Many of these options aren’t terribly helpful, though. Facebook seems to constantly adjust its privacy settings, and it can be difficult to tell what information your friends have access to. On TikTok, unless you want a fully private account, you have to select who can see each and every video before you post. And Twitter’s protected-Tweets feature isn’t ideal if you have a large following; the “Retweet” button may be disabled, but your followers can still screenshot and share what you post.
Instagram arguably edges out the competition with its Close Friends feature, which allows people to share Stories with a curated list of followers that, has bred frustration and seems to be , Close Friends is a corner of the platform that many still find useful. The feature’s advantage is that it mitigates the effects of what social scientists call “context collapse—the idea that on social, there’s a flattening of multiple audiences in one space,” Elia Powers, an associate professor in the mass-communication department at Towson University, told me. “It’s akin to being at a wedding and giving a speech to friends, parents, in-laws, and people you don’t know.” Jokes about your college exploits, for instance, won’t necessarily land with your Boomer relatives as they might with your best friends.
