What stories and following lists show,
and what they never will.

Most answers to these questions online are guesses, or they are written by someone selling an app that asks for your password. These are the accurate ones, with the limits stated plainly.

• What Instagram Plus isInstagram Plus is a paid monthly subscription from Meta, $3.99 a month in most countries. Most of it is about your own stories: push one to the top of feeds, keep it up an extra 24 hours, see how many times it was rewatched. One feature looks the other way — Story Preview opens someone else’s story without adding your name to their viewer list.
• See who unfollowed you on InstagramInstagram has never shown who unfollowed you and there is no hidden menu for it. The only method that works is comparing your follower list at two points in time. Everything that appears to do it automatically is doing exactly that behind the scenes.
• Hide your following list on InstagramThere is no setting that hides only your following list while your account is not private. Instagram does not offer one. Making your account private is the only mechanism that hides it, and it hides your followers list and your posts at the same time. The same is true whether you call it Instagram or IG: there is no switch for the following list alone.
• Unfollow everyone on InstagramThere is no bulk unfollow. Instagram has no button for it and no setting, so the only route is one account at a time — and the app throttles you long before you finish.
• Tell if someone follows youOpen your own followers list and search their username. If they appear there, they follow you. Their profile also says "Follows you" under the name when they do.
• See who someone recently followedNot on the first look, by anyone. Instagram removed the following activity tab in 2019 and the list is ordered by ranking, not by date, so there is nothing recent to read. Recent follows exist only as the difference between two reads of the list, and that is what a tool has to do for you: read it again and show what changed.
• Export an Instagram following listInstagram's own data download is the complete, official way to get your following list as a file. You request it from your account settings, and it arrives as JSON or HTML containing every account you follow along with the date you followed it.
• How the following list is orderedOn your own account you can sort your following list by the date you followed. On someone else's account you cannot. That list is ordered by Instagram's own ranking, so the name at the top is not their most recent follow.
• Hide who you follow on TikTokSwitching the account to private is what restricts your following and followers lists to people you have approved. On a TikTok account, those lists are visible to visitors by default.
• Watch Instagram stories anonymouslyInstagram adds your name to a story’s viewer list the moment you open it in the app, and there is no setting to turn that off. You stay off the list only if the story is opened by something other than your account: a web viewer that reads the stories of accounts that are not private, or an account that isn’t you. Airplane mode is unreliable. None of this works for private accounts.
• View Instagram highlightsHighlights are stories an account chose to keep. They sit in a row of circles under the bio and they don’t expire. Tap a circle to watch them in the app. The owner sees who watched a highlight only during the 48 hours after that story was first posted; after that, only a view count remains. For an account you can also watch them in a web viewer, with no Instagram account.
• Does Instagram notify screenshots of stories?No. Instagram does not notify anyone when you screenshot or screen-record a story, and the same goes for posts, reels, highlights and profiles. The one exception is in direct messages: a disappearing photo or video, sent as “view once” or “allow replay” or in vanish mode, does alert the sender if you screenshot it. What the owner of a story does see is that you watched it.
• Hide your followers on InstagramInstagram has no switch that hides your followers list on its own. On an account that is not private, anyone can open it, logged in or not. The only way to hide it from strangers is to make the account private, and even then the followers you approved can still see it. Beyond that you can remove individual followers or block them, and neither one notifies them.
• Unfollow someone on InstagramOpen the person’s profile, tap the button that says “Following”, and choose Unfollow. You can also do it from your own following list, where each account has the same button. Instagram doesn’t notify them. If the account is private, you will have to send a new follow request to see it again.
• What a follow request is on InstagramWhen you tap Follow on a private account, you don’t follow it yet: Instagram sends a follow request and the button changes to “Requested”. The owner can approve it, delete it, or leave it unanswered forever. Instagram has no screen that lists the requests you have sent; the only complete list is inside the data download, in a file called pending_follow_requests.
• See who follows you on InstagramOpen your profile and tap the number above “followers”. The list shows every account that follows you, with a search box at the top. To check one person, search their name there, or open their profile: if it says “Follows you” under their name, they do. Instagram shows who follows you; it never shows who stopped.
• Stop someone from following you on InstagramOpen your followers list, find the person and tap Remove: they stop following you and are not notified. On an account that is not private, they can simply follow you again, so if it has to last, block them or make your account private. Blocking is the only option that works against one person while the account is not private.
• Know if someone blocked you on InstagramInstagram doesn’t notify you when someone blocks you, and there is no list of who did. The reliable test is to look at the profile from somewhere that isn’t your account: a logged-out browser, a second account, or a web tool that reads profiles from outside. If the profile exists there and is missing from your app, you were blocked. If it is missing everywhere, the account was deactivated, deleted, or renamed.
• Can you see who viewed your Instagram profile?No. Instagram has never shown who visits a profile, and it doesn’t give that information to any app, so nobody else can show it either. The only views with names attached are stories: the owner sees who watched each one for 48 hours. Professional accounts also get a number of profile visits, without names.
• Can you see who views your Instagram story?Yes. Open your own story and swipe up, or tap the viewers icon at the bottom left: Instagram lists every account that opened it. The list is available for 48 hours after the story was posted. It doesn’t show how many times each person watched, and it doesn’t show anyone who watched without an Instagram account, for example through a web viewer.
• How long Instagram stories lastA story is visible for 24 hours from the moment it is posted, then it disappears from the profile. Each video story can run up to 60 seconds; a photo shows for a few seconds. After 24 hours the story lives on only in its owner’s private archive, unless they add it to a highlight, which stays on the profile until removed.
• Can someone see if you viewed their TikTok profile?Only if both of you have the Profile views setting turned on. TikTok’s profile view history is opt-in and works in both directions: with it on, you see who visited your profile in the last 30 days, and you appear in the history of the people you visit who also have it on. Turn it off and your visits leave no name anywhere. TikTok never shows who watched a video, only how many times it was watched.
• Can you view a private Instagram account?No. A private account shows its posts, stories, highlights, followers and following only to followers it has approved. Everyone else sees the name, the picture, the bio and three numbers. There is no tool, app or trick that gets past that, and the sites that say they can are after your password, your card, or a survey click. The only way in is a follow request that the owner accepts.
• What "following" means"Following" is the list of accounts a person chose to follow. "Followers" is the list of accounts that chose to follow them. The first is their decision; the second is other people’s.
• See who doesn't follow you backInstagram has no screen for it. The answer comes from subtracting one list from the other: everyone you follow who is not in your followers list. Both lists are yours, so nothing privileged is involved.