Instagram

Originally developed as a means for people to connect, make plans, and play games, Instagram has evolved into one of the most widely used social network sites in the world with more than 1.2 billion users as of late 2020. Instagram offers an array of communication options including photo posts, videos, memes, GIFs, live video sharing, longer form content sharing (i.e., IGTV), archiving, commenting, and direct messaging. These features, along with Instagram’s easily accessible and widely used geo-tagging and hashtagging options, have collectively helped the social network site become an important news and information sharing platform while promoting new forms of engagement among news organizations, journalists, and news audiences.

As news organizations continue their decades-long efforts to effectively thread social network sites into journalism, Instagram has ...