Location

In March 2017, Instagram introduced geostickers for São Paulo, place-related stickers for Stories that people can use while exploring the city5. Meta’s patent on selecting content describes broader possible meanings for a post’s location: where it was created, where someone interacted with it, or a place associated with a person or entity depicted in it6. Introduced in August 2025, Instagram’s Friend Map displays photos, carousels and Stories with locations attached; Mosseri explained that a location-tagged Story appears there for 24 hours, showing the tagged place to the creator’s followers rather than sharing the creator’s real-time location24. For older Stories, Mosseri describes calendar and map views that let people filter their own posting history by date or location8. Meta’s social-network maps patent proposes interactive maps of posts from a story with multiple contributors, positioned near named businesses, restaurants, parks, attractions or broader geographic areas7. That Meta patent also proposes finding nearby places through posts from followed accounts and a topic or location someone enters7.

Location sharing on Instagram’s Friend Map starts completely off and requires the person to enable it, with three audience choices named by Mosseri: a custom list, Close Friends, or followers the person follows back2. Meta’s patents describe other kinds of personal-location information, including where someone currently uses a social network, a location in their profile, their hometown and their workplace69. Meta’s place-ranking patent describes estimating a mobile device’s distance from wireless equipment using how strongly the device receives Wi-Fi or cellular transmissions10. Meta’s next-place patent proposes predicting where someone might visit after another place and supplying information or suggestions about likely destinations11.

Instagram has also used location to show the country an account holder is in: in April 2020, Mosseri described a US pilot that displayed an account’s country in Feed when most of its followers were in another country3. Instagram’s Help Center describes a different use in Insights, where viewer statistics include the top countries and cities of the unique accounts that have seen content1. These audience breakdowns require reaching more than 100 accounts and selecting a preset timeframe1.