Teenagers have found a novel way to plan parties - Instagram Party accounts. This has also caught the attention of its head Adam Mosseri.
What Happened: Teens are resorting to the creation of private Instagram handles that hint at the date or the event.
These accounts, set to private, include the date of the party in the bio section and occasionally the organizers' handles along with specific instructions for the invitees.
Mosseri, too, noticed this trend and quipped that it was a benign but unintended use of the platform.
"Interestingly we've seen a lot of young people use Instagram to coordinate events by simply creating an account for the event and inviting people by following them from the account," Mosseri said in a post on Threads.
"It's a hack, but sometimes the (benign) abuses of the app are more interesting than the intended uses."
The address of the party is generally posted an hour before the commencement of the event, and this originated among teens in Los Angeles and has now spread nationwide, according to a 2018 article in The Atlantic, which called Instagram "the new e-vite."
It is also increasingly happening on another app owned by Meta Platforms Inc.
Essentially, users create a group that is specific to an event - in this case, it could be a party or a wedding. The creators then add all the invitees and send all the updates there.
Why It Matters: Although Mosseri has called it a "hack", other users pointed out that this shows that there is a use case that Instagram can fulfill by launching an official feature to handle events.
A user pointed out that this feature could be beneficial not just for individuals, but also for businesses, allowing them to post event-specific updates on the platform without cluttering their regular feeds.
