Social media is an unarguably great way to keep in touch with people by posting updates on your day-to-day life. Not everyone, however, wants complete strangers to stay in touch too.
Thankfully, popular platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram all have privacy control settings that allows users to choose who can can’t see their posts. This way your mom won’t be able to see that you were out partying instead of studying last night.
These are all the ways you can control your privacy on all four social media platforms according to WIRED.
Most people who still use Facebook today are, let’s be honest, parents and older relatives. This means they are most likely to be posting pictures of their children so staying private is very important.
If you post something on the desktop or the Facebook app, you can select who gets to see and comment on it. For the app, just click on the three dots on the top right corner and click on ‘Edit Privacy’. From there you have the option to either make it accessible to ‘Public’, ‘Friends’, or ‘Friends except…’ where you can hide it from one of your followers.
There is also a ‘Privacy Shortcuts’ button in your profile settings that will let you know all the other ways to control your privacy from location to face recognition on the app.
On Instagram, there are two ways to make your account private. You can turn it from public to private in settings so only your followers can see your posts. You can also have control over your Instagram Stories by hiding them from certain followers (AKA all family members and relatives please!).
To make your account private, click the three dashes in the top right corner of you profile and click on ‘Settings’. From there click ‘Privacy’, then ‘Account Privacy’, and there you can turn on ‘Private Account’.
To hide your story, click ‘Settings’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Story’, and then ‘Hide Story From’ to choose which account from your followers list that you want to hide your story from.
Lastly, if you only want a very small group of from your followers to see your Instagram stories, you can make a close friends list and only share it to them. You can do that when you are trying to post a story, click ‘Close Friends Only’ under ‘Your Story’.
Twitter is probably the most straightforward platform out of all four in regards to controlling privacy settings. Your account is either public or private period. That’s why you’re probably better off just making a second private account to post all of your rants and subtweets.
To make your account private, go to ‘Settings and Privacy’, click ‘Privacy and Safety’, and then you can choose to ‘Protect your Tweets’ and whether you can receive direct messages from anyone.
There are talks about updating the privacy controls for twitter. You can read about Twitter possibly changing its privacy control settings to be more like Facebook here.
Snapchat
Snapchat is more or less the same concept as Instagram Stories when it comes to sharing posts with certain people.
You can choose ‘Private Story’ instead of ‘My Story’ by choosing a list of people you want to give access to and naming it whatever you want. This way you send all of the wild snaps to friends, the professional ones to family, and the neutrals to your main.
Ghost Mode can also be turned on in settings so no one can access your location or see when you’re active on the app.
Don’t forget you can also use direct messaging on all four platforms to share posts and texts with specific followers only.
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