The Sinister Reason Why Instagram Keeps Erasing Your Memories
Reading Time: 5 minutesYou Should Stop Trusting Google and Instagram With Your Photos, The latest glitch erased users’ archived Stories, reminding us how fragile our digital memories are—and how little Big Tech really cares about preserving them., Instagram Story archives: The s
Instagram has been in the news lately for all sorts of unflattering reasons: planning to force ‘mixed reality‘ experiences and A.I.-generated images onto user feeds, testing out a weird custom sound meant to be incorporated within all uploaded Reels, getting fined by the European Union for having leaked up to 600 million accounts’ login credentials, and earning outrage from celebrities for training Meta’s A.I. models on their posts while allegedly reducing their profiles’ general visibility. Amid this flurry of bad PR, the social network has also been accused of permanently deleting many users’ old Stories, from their Story Archive and Story Highlights collections.
Since July 31, users who’ve attempted to look up certain Instagram Stories have instead seen this notification: ‘Due to a technical issue, this story is no longer available. While we’ve since fixed this issue, your story can’t be restored.’ The text appeared on a black screen where the affected Story photo had once been, sans any indication of what that old post may have contained.
For video Stories, you might be able to view a static thumbnail, with no hope of recovering the rest of the footage. Unless you automatically backed up all your Instagram Stories to your phone’s camera roll, you were out of luck. The notices themselves will also disappear by July 2025, erasing any last trace of those records.
When CNN reported on the deletions, Meta ‘declined to share how many users were affected’ and blamed the fiasco on a ‘bug.’ (The company did not respond to MediaDownloader’s request for comment.) We’re not likely to get further clarification on the matter, since Instagram executives have already moved on to allowing you to comment on others’ Stories and advising budding (and paying) influencers on ‘best practices‘ for success. But the story of the disappearing Stories shouldn’t be so easily overlooked, and that’s not just because it’s hardly the first time Instagram has screwed up users’ Stories. Rather, it also augurs a grim future for our digital identities and memories, wrought by the very Big Tech giants that pitched themselves as sturdy guardians of the text posts, photos, and videos we keep uploading—and that they keep exploiting.
It may be hard to recollect now, but there was a time when 24-hour ‘Stories’ posts were never meant to be memories. The originator of the concept, Snapchat, started out as a simple photo-sharing app that promised to consign your private visual messages after just a few seconds each. Snapchat fans took this for granted, so there was a minor scandal when the tech press revealed that those messages weren’t really disappearing forever after all—instead, they would be relocated to another spot in your phone drive, buried deep under myriad folders, and still recoverable for anyone tech-savvy enough to dig.
Still, as they tend to do with scandal-plagued social platforms, many users moved on and adjusted accordingly, especially as Snapchat rolled out temporary Stories and as Instagram blatantly mimicked the feature in 2016. A year after that, Instagram—once again taking a cue from Snapchat—enabled an option for you to automatically back up your Stories to a special ‘Story Archive’ on the app and also show off old Stories on your profile, long past their 24-hour lifespan, in custom themed galleries known as Highlights. ‘Instagram says a significant (though undisclosed) number of users were downloading their stories daily, and other users complained that they had intended to but forgot,’ as Casey Newton wrote in the Verge. ‘A private archive represents an obvious-to-the-point-of-being-inevitable solution.’
Instagram and Snapchat were just two of the many platforms that had pledged to help forgetful, regretful netizens save their nominally temporary posts as long-lasting memories. The 2010s saw a Silicon Valley hype cycle for cloud-computing capacity, with Google, Verizon, and Microsoft following Amazon Web Services’ lead in establishing custom, hardware-intensive data-storage systems and inviting established companies, novel startups, government departments, and ordinary users to entrust them with their data—sometimes for free but, in many premium cases, for hefty fees.
The ‘cloud’ symbology helpfully obscured a complex system (which required loads and loads of money, electricity, and physical infrastructure to maintain) by branding this morass as a secure, intuitive space in the internet netherworld that was easy to use: just sync your phone and computer up to the system with a few taps! Why go out and splurge on an external hard drive for a laborious backup process when you can simply have the whole thing happen in real time?
Of course, we’re still told time and time again by experts that the internet is not forever, that you need to regularly, consistently back your shit up elsewhere offline, and that specialized drives are worth the cost and effort. That is all well and good, and is obviously sound advice. (I do it myself.) Yet at this point, we’re all actively incentivized and encouraged to make our communication and social infrastructure not just our dumping grounds, but also our permanent archives, through straightforward ease of use.
It takes so much time to sift through all your messy, likely disorganized files, to pick and choose the most important ones, to hook up and sync the external drive, and to transfer everything to that black box, which you’ll likely protect with some login credentials and stow away in some drawer. But your Google Drive is right there, you can drag and drop and upload even your biggest files at a speedy pace, and you can access them at all times with a few keystrokes and clicks. That’s the appeal of the cloud, and that’s what makes building caverns worth of always-running, high-temperature computer drives worth it for Big Tech’s bottom line. Google isn’t prompting you to pay for more and more account storage for nothing.
Still, despite the investment and attention, so many of these pixelated clouds are fragile, and their space finite. In 2019, Flickr imposed a 1,000-photo cap on various accounts and began deleting images from users who didn’t proactively clean house. That same year, MySpace revealed that it had lost 50 million songs uploaded to its platform during a botched server transfer, and Google finally sunset its beleaguered Google+ social network by junking all the accounts’ data with it. In 2016, Facebook pulled the plug on its photo-syncing services and forced Facebookers to download a whole other app instead. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the fleeting nature of privatized internet preservation.
Over the decades, the web has come a long way in freeing up bandwidth and storage capacity; the ability to post a minutelong video as an Instagram Story in just a matter of seconds may seem like nothing less than magic to those who remember how long it once took to download a single stinkin’ album off LimeWire. That also makes it easy to forget, however, that recordings, images, and games are massive in size, digitally compressed and optimized though they may be. Eventually, the files keep racking up, the data centers run hot, the imperative to build out more becomes a priority, and the money needed to accomplish this becomes a massive line item.
But by now, you already know that Meta, Google, and Microsoft are not focusing their rapid (and ruinous) data-center buildouts for the sake of your online memories. The impetus is all artificial intelligence, which needs those megacomputers to store and process sundry sources of data that will train its programs—including, what do ya know, your personal-account uploads. But even if they become collateral damage in the hefty process of moving this data from center to center, well, so what? Mark Zuckerberg is not interested in compensating you after taking all the photos, videos, and posts that made his company so successful and valuable; there’re always more slop for the trough.
So is it really all that shocking, in the end, that Instagram can’t even be bothered to keep its much-ballyhooed Story Archives secure for the consumers who’ve made it such a globally dominant platform? It shouldn’t be, since it’s clear what Instagram thinks your memories are really worth, despite professing so much concern over its users’ feedback. But it still should serve as a warning for you and everyone else you know who’s depending on these virtual clouds for saving everything. Because they’ve shown us over and over again that they’re not going to bother saving everything forever.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG