How to See Who Shares Instagram Stories

Instagram is the most used photographic social media in the world, but not everyone knows that many of its features have been taken from Snapchat, another social network based on photo sharing. Among these functions there are surely the stories that last 24 hours.

What Instagram Stories Are

After the attention employed towards the photos by Instagram, now, instead, they are giving more importance to the so called stories. Introduced on the platform in 2016, the stories are small videos with which you can share your own everyday life with the followers. But what makes them so popular is the fact that they only last 24 hours and, after this period of time, they automatically cancel themselves. In this way you can share whatever you want, even photo or video that are funny or embarrassing, because they will not stay online forever, but only for one day.

Stories are becoming more and more used even by commercial brands, in order to make their products known. They are used also by famous people, in order to show a simpler and more human side of themselves, which otherwise would not come out with a photo that is often retouched.

Sharing Stories on Instagram

Since these stories were introduced on Instagram, the platform has been trying to find more and more new ways to update their features, so they do not become a monotonous thing that, after a long time, could tire the community that uses the social media.

A new feature, that was introduced a couple of years ago, is the possibility to share the stories you see on Instagram in the Direct of someone else. In fact, now when you see a story, beside the section where it is possible to write a message to the person who shared the content, there is the symbol of a paper airplane. By clicking on this symbol it is possible to share the story with other people through private message.

Privacy, however, is becoming a fundamental part to consider on various social networks, and also on Instagram. In fact, now is the user who can decide who can see and share their own contents. This is the reason why, if the account of the person who published the story is private, when you share it with someone else, it will be visible only to those who follow that same person. In the contrary case, it will not be visible.

How to See Who Shares the Stories

When it comes to posting a photo or a video in your own stories of Instagram, you are still sharing something that is personal. So, it may happen to want to know who, among your followers, has seen or shared your story. But mainly because it may happen that someone takes the contents of your stories and maybe reshares them on a fake profile.

In order to avoid this, Instagram has put the ban on sharing the stories of other people through official channels. You can share a story of someone else only if there is your tag on it. In this way the content becomes also of your property and you have the right to share it on your profile. When you are tagged, you usually get a written message which says that that person mentioned you in their story, along with the option to add that content within your stories.

However, there are other unofficial ways to take a story and share it on other profiles, such as screenshots. Until some time ago, there was the possibility of being warned every time that someone made a screenshot of your stories. This feature then has been removed in a short time and you can no longer find out who shares the stories through this way.

Once that this warning mechanism has been eliminated, however, no other mechanism has been introduced, and today there is no way to control who shares the stories that you put on Instagram. There is only one way to make sure that none of your followers have shared your story. You should go and see the stories of all the people who follow you, one by one, and see if any of them shared the story. But it is obvious that this is a slow procedure, which takes a lot of time and that is not even very reliable, because the people who follow you may have taken the screenshot of the story and shared it with someone you do not have among the followers.

How to Protect Your Contents

Therefore, if you do not want that people outside your circle of friends to watch and share your stories on other places, what is necessary to do is follow two simple steps.

First of all, you have to set your Instagram profile as private. So you will decide who can follow you and, consequently, who can see your stories. In order to do this, you have to go to your profile, by clicking on your photo at the right bottom. Now, open the side menu, by making a click on the symbol with the three dashes up on the right, and go to Settings. So, go to Privacy and, where it is written Account privacy, set to Private.

Finally, if you do not want to show certain stories to all the people to whom you have given the permission to follow you, you can create a list of the closest friends who can see them. In order to create this list, all you have to do is to go to your profile and then open the side menu, by going to the symbol of the three dashes at the top right. In this case, you have to click on the item Close friends and then on the button Get Started. To conclude, add all the people you want to be part of this list of closest friends and press on Create List. At the moment in which you go to post a story, there will be nothing left but choosing the option Closest Friends and the game will be done.