Welcome to Instagram: A fun photo sharing app but not for everyone A historiography on how Instagram’s policy changes reflect on the ‘open and inclusive’ media-utopic image Instagram maintains

Abstract

This research aims to provide a perspective on the constant struggle Instagram experiences in maintaining its ‘open and inclusive’ image while moderating content (and sometimes taking this too far). Through a self-fashioned methodology, grounded in the historiography approach by Helmond and van der Vlist (2019), I analyzed three time periods in Instagram’s history. In the analysis I looked at how Instagram’s policy changes reflect the tension between the platform portraying its ‘open and inclusive’ image, while also enforcing its rules and guidelines. The objective of this thesis is to make the discussion of the policies of- and governance on Instagram more tangible with this investigation into the past. Through not only looking at the textual changes, but also at the contextual changes of the corpus, I was able to filter subtle changes in the interface which have an impact on the way Instagram portrays itself. As appears from the discursive interface analysis (Stanfill 2015), Instagram has grown a lot since the start of the platform. Not only in the number of users and exposure, but I distill a process of “growing up”. Instagram started with an innocent idea to help people connect throughout the world through their digital Polaroids, but as we also see in the analysis, these notions of openness are not always reality. The focus of Instagram on their grandness, openness and the accompanying media-utopian narrative, exists next to Instagram further expanding their rules and guidelines. And at the same time making these pages also less the center of attention of the platform. So, this thesis shows the added value of not only looking at policy documents but looking at these documents in their discursive context.