Instagram working on School Stories, targeting high schools

Working on a groups feature targeting university students during the last few months, Instagram has now started to work on a collaborative School Stories feature. Only students of a particular school will be able to see the story or contribute to it. In addition, Instagram is planning to apply a strict moderation so it can not be used for bullying.

Instagram’s code even has warning about this matter:

School stories are manually reviewed to make sure the community is safe.

School Stories, aims to provide a fun space for children, without the supervision of parents or strangers. Nevertheless, this story format could cause envy and exclusion problems to increase.

This feature has been discovered in Instagram’s codes by Jane Manchun Wong, who is known for discovering all the secret features of Instagram. Instagram declined to comment on the feature that has been discovered. Still, other features like name tags, video calling and music tags, which had also been discovered by Wong, and had been launched later, without any further comments or statement of Instagram.

Let’s remind you that there have been many features that Instagram has tested but then decided not to launch. Also, even if the company decides to launch this feature, it is possible that School Stories will launch many months later.

School Stories could create a huge moderation issue, because all would be “manually reviewed”. Also, the company could get new harassment issues. As bullying has no sharp edges, it is not always straight name-calling. In American Vandal, a documentation on Netflix, Thurd Burglar had bullied his classmates over his Instagram account and tormented them. This is the exact reason why Instagram might not launch this feature.

Instagram’s new URL feature 

Besides this discussed feature, Instagram is testing a more functional feature. Instagram has created a prototype for Instagram Stories URL’s, so that users can share their stories on other platforms as well. This feature, which could become a very powerful feature for influencers, celebrities and brands, will enable them to attract viewers from different platforms.

Instagram declined to comment on this feature as well but marketers might especially love to be able to link ads or other social network accounts to drive more traffic. Brands can increase the accessibility and views of dynamic contents as these Story URL’s will probably be shared all over Twitter or YouTube and other social networks.

Apparently; Instagram is committed to enhancing the interaction in Stories with innovations made for both the brands and the users. In particular, because the improvements about the University and School focus on the creation of new communities on the platform, it reminds us again that Instagram's parent company, Facebook, was also a school platform in the first place.