Old internet pastimes have taken on new formats as Instagram makes online chain mail trendy again.
Instagram’s “Add yours” stickers, which enable any user to create an easily resharable story template, have popularized photo-sharing trends reminiscent of 2000s-era email and Facebook chains threatening users to reshare copypasta — (often spammy) copied-and-pasted content — either to avoid negative consequences or to show support for causes.
Since the app enabled user-made templates late last year, said a spokesperson for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, hundreds of millions of “Add yours” templates have been shared globally. The stories prompt others either to respond with their own content or to simply repost pre-written text or premade designs.
Trending stickers often urge users to post something specific — such as photo dumps for the month, baby photos or pictures of their dogs — by claiming they’ll have bad luck if they fail to do so. Other popular templates have also circulated chain mail formats old and new, from copypasta legal statements to artificial intelligence-generated posters such as the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” image, which was reshared more than 47 million times last month.
Jonathan Philip, 30, a photographer who says he spends up to eight hours a day on Instagram, said he believes the templates are essentially a recycled form of engagement bait, especially when they try to threaten or guilt-trip users into taking part.
“I’ve been seeing a lot of posts more recently that are like ‘I bet you skip’ or that kind of thing, where I feel a lot of people just feel they need to be part of something,” said Philip, who posted on X that the Instagram stories are the 2024 equivalent of old email copypasta.
Fola Olusanya, 25, said such templates seem like photo-based iterations of the chain text messages she would receive in middle school, which often threatened “send this to 10 people or I’m gonna die.” But nowadays, she said, people probably aren’t posting so much out of fear as out of a desire to share something they already wanted to show off.“I think it’s good to have an excuse. People don’t like posting stuff and just being like, ‘Hey, look at my life, it’s so cool and fun,’” said Olusanya, who also commented about the phenomenon on TikTok. “So I think that having a prompt might be easier for some people, because they’ll be able to be like, ‘Oh, I was obligated to do this because I was told if I didn’t, I’d get bad luck.’”
Meta doesn’t have a search function for “Add yours” stickers, a spokesperson confirmed, meaning users can come across them only by chance while they’re browsing others’ stories. That also makes it virtually impossible to find a template, even an extremely viral one, after it falls out of use unless an account has stored the sticker in a permanent story highlight.
Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama, said it makes sense that modern chain mail would take on such a form. She said the Instagram templates combine the ease of opting in with the natural desire to participate in something trending.
“I think the reason we’re seeing so much of it now is Instagram has made it so much easier for people to create their own templates,” Maddox said. “And these templates are just tapping into that desire for easy communication, connection and community that have always been part of our digital world.”
While many on Instagram have taken a liking to the photo-sharing chains, others have drawn online criticism and ridicule after having fallen for more unoriginal types of chain mail spam.
Last week, amid a growing wave of concern over whether social platforms are nonconsensually scraping user data to train AI, hundreds of thousands of users shared a template issuing the statement: “I own the copyright to all images and posts submitted to my instagram profile and therefore do not consent to Meta or other companies using them to train generative AI platforms. This includes all future AND past posts/stories/threads on my profile.”
The copypasta statement immediately reminded some users of similar (and just as ineffective) legal notices from a decade ago, when Facebook users would post versions of such statements to ward against rumored policy changes thought to affect user privacy.“Hi all. Don’t forget today starts the new Instagram rule where they can use your photo Don’t forget Deadline tomorrow !!!” read a popular copypasta from 2012, archived on the fact-checking site Snopes. “Everything you’ve ever posted becomes public from tomorrow. Even messages that have been deleted or the photos not allowed. It costs nothing for a simple copy and paste, better safe than sorry.”
Another copypasta notice from 2013, also archived on Snopes, warned that “Facebook is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you prefer, you can copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once, it will be tactically allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in the profile status updates. Do not share; copy and paste.”
Jeremy Fisher, 36, a stop motion director and animator, said many of the fellow artists he follows on Instagram have reshared the viral copypasta statement because of AI-related copyright concerns.
“They’re not super involved in the AI conversation for the most part,” Fisher said. “It seems like they’re trying to check boxes and make sure that this is a thing that protects their work. ... It seems very much just like ‘OK, I posted that, and I should be fine and good to go.’”
Even as the ways people use social media evolve, some forms of chain mail and copypasta seem to resurface every few years. But such statements, while seeming silly, reflect an ongoing pattern of user concern over how tech companies are handling their data — especially in the wake of a recent Adobe policy change that stirred outrage from creatives who feared it meant their content would be used for AI training without consent.
Maddox said that taps into much broader issues around the relative dearth of data privacy regulation in the U.S. compared with some other countries, as well as a lack of understanding among the general public about how to protect their data online.
“Almost similar to the [viral AI-generated] Rafah image, it makes people feel like they are taking control of something, maybe, or making a stand and making their voices be known,” she said. “But whether with an AI image or a statement about social media data use, both come up short and don’t actually really do anything.”
