Photo: Nuchylee (Shutterstock)
When you post on Instagram, you don’t expect to find it on other sites or platforms. After all, you posted it to Instagram, not Facebook. But Instagram posts are winding up on Facebook, to the surprise of many inactive Facebook users. So what’s going on?
Meta may have tricked you into sharing your Instagram posts to Facebook
As reported by The New York Times, the issue lies in a sneaky strategy Instagram launched last year. At some point, the app might have presented you with a pop-up, asking if you’d like future Instagram posts to also post to your Facebook page. If you’re someone who doesn’t use your Facebook account much, you’d likely want to opt out of the setting and keep your posts to the app you’re actually active on. However, the option to opt out was a discrete hyperlink, while the option to opt in was a large, blue button.
It seems many people tapped the big button, assuming it was the option that would close the pop-up fastest, not realizing they had actually signed themselves up for perpetual Facebook posts and all that comes with it. That’s exactly what Meta intended: The company was interested in boosting the number of users sharing Instagram posts to Facebook and designed the pop-up in such a way that the majority of Instagram users would agree (knowingly or not) to permanently share their posts and stories to Facebook.
While some might enjoy providing the same content across both platforms, it’s horrifying for others. For many—especially younger users—Instagram is more of a platform to share with friends, while Facebook is where the—shudder—older people are. At the least, Facebook is a tad more “formal,” where you’re friends with everyone from family members to coworkers to former teachers. You might not want to share the same content with those people as you would your closer circle.
To be clear, Facebook integration with Instagram has been around forever, well before the name change to Meta. The company formally known as Facebook acquired Insta back in 2012 for $1 billion and made it easy to share your latest ‘gram to your Facebook page, as well as Twitter, Tumblr, and a handful of other apps. They just decided to play dirty in the past year, tricking users into sharing more than they might want.
How to turn off Facebook sharing on Instagram
Fortunately, disabling the Facebook sharing feature is easy. Instagram includes a “Share to Facebook” button on the final page before you share a post, but this option only disables sharing for the post at hand. If you agreed to share to Facebook permanently, the toggle will be active again the next time you post. The same goes for stories: You can long press “Your stories” to disable Facebook sharing this one time, but it’ll share to Facebook next time, too.
You can disable the option for good from Settings > Account > Sharing to other apps > Facebook. Disable all Automatically share options here, including “Your Instagram Story,” “Your Instagram Posts,” and, if you set it up, “Your Instagram Reels.” You’ll also find a similar option on the review page for a post. Tap “Advanced Settings,” then you’ll find a “Share Your Posts to Facebook” toggle under Preferences.
