Instagram Trivia
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48 free Instagram trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Instagram trivia quiz tells the app's story in questions: the check-in app called Burbn that pivoted to photos, the first post at Pier 38, the square 640-pixel frame, the $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012, and the milestones on the way to a billion users. It then works through the features everyone uses without thinking: hashtags and Explore, the Lux filter, 15-second video, Direct messages, Stories and their 24-hour clock, Boomerang and Hyperlapse, IGTV's rise and fall, Reels and its TikTok rivalry, and the algorithm changes, outages, fines and redesigns that made headlines. The early questions are easy for anyone who has posted a photo; the later ones reward people who remember when the feed was chronological. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which star's record for the most-liked Instagram post fell in January 2019 to a stock photo of an egg?
Kylie Jenner
Kylie Jenner's photo announcing baby Stormi had topped 18 million likes; weeks later the egg's creator, a London ad creative, used it in a Hulu mental-health ad.
Q 02When Instagram launched in October 2010, which phone could run it?
iPhone
iPhone: the founders built Instagram around photos taken on the iPhone 4, which had come out only months before the launch.
Q 03Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram with which Brazilian software engineer?
Mike Krieger
Mike Krieger later teamed up with Systrom again on Artifact, an AI news app that Yahoo bought, and in 2024 became Anthropic's chief product officer.
Q 04What was the name of the mobile check-in app that became Instagram?
Burbn
Burbn let people check in, make plans and post photos, but it had too many features, so its founders cut everything except photos, comments and likes.
Q 05Instagram's founders dropped their check-in app partly because it was too similar to which rival?
Foursquare
Foursquare's venue database still powered Instagram's location tags for years, until Instagram began testing a replacement in 2014.
Q 06'Instagram' is a portmanteau of 'instant camera' and which word?
Telegram
Telegram: Kevin Systrom said the name captured what users were doing, sending 'an instant telegram of sorts', and that it also sounded 'camera-y'.
Q 07What reason did Kevin Systrom's girlfriend give for not wanting to share photos on his early app?
They didn't look good
They didn't look good, she said, so Systrom decided the app needed filters, and he spent that afternoon building one, X-Pro II.
Q 08Which company bought Instagram in April 2012?
Facebook promised to keep Instagram running independently rather than fold it into its own app, and Systrom stayed on to run it.
Q 09Roughly how much did Instagram sell for in 2012?
$1bn
$1bn was the headline price, but most of it was paid in the buyer's shares, and after their price dropped the deal was worth about $736.5m.
Q 10For nearly five years, Instagram made every photo fit which shape?
A square
A square: in Florence, a professor had given Systrom a plastic Holga camera that took square photos, and every Instagram post had to be one until August 2015.
Q 11An Instagram Story stays visible to others for how many hours?
24
24 hours: Systrom said Stories let people share a stream of everyday moments without flooding their profile or their followers' feeds.
Q 12In 2019, what did Instagram start doing when someone typed a comment that resembled bullying?
Asked if they were sure
Asked if they were sure: people could still post, but Instagram said early tests showed some chose to undo the comment and share something less hurtful.
Q 13Which US agency's antitrust case argued that Meta should never have been allowed to buy Instagram?
The FTC
The FTC lost in November 2025, when Judge James Boasberg ruled it had not shown that Meta still held monopoly power.
Q 21Reels, introduced in August 2020, was built to compete with which app?
TikTok
TikTok's formula of short clips set to existing sounds was the model, and by November 2020 Reels had its own tab on Instagram's home screen.
Q 22Which Instagram tab, dropped in 2019, showed what your friends were liking and commenting on?
Following
Following went because, Instagram's head of product said, many people didn't realise their likes and comments were showing up there.
Q 23Which singer's 2012 video for 'Anything Could Happen' was built from fans' Instagram photos?
Ellie Goulding
Ellie Goulding asked fans to photograph single words from the song, and about 1,200 of their Instagram photos made it into the clip.
Q 14What do users call it when Instagram quietly hides someone's posts from others without telling them?
Shadowbanning
Instagram was shadowbanning by 2017, hiding posts with spammy hashtags from search results as it fought bots and paid-for likes.
Q 15Which religious leader joined Instagram in March 2016, weeks after meeting its co-founder Kevin Systrom?
Pope Francis
Pope Francis doesn't take or upload the photos himself: members of the Vatican's staff run the account for him.
Q 16Which co-founder of Twitter invested in Instagram's $7 million Series A in 2011?
Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey was an early fan: Systrom, who had sat beside him as an intern at Odeo, showed him Instagram before it launched.
Q 17Who became head of Instagram in October 2018 after the founders stepped down?
Adam Mosseri
Adam Mosseri told a Senate hearing in December 2021 that Instagram would bring back a chronological feed option.
Q 18Instagram's test hiding public like counts began in May 2019 in which country?
Canada
Canada: Instagram said it wanted people to worry less about how many likes they got, and that July the test spread to six more countries.
Q 19Which Instagram video app, launched in 2018 for long vertical videos, was shut down in March 2022?
IGTV
IGTV was pitched as Instagram's answer to YouTube, but Instagram scrapped the separate app to keep all video, including Reels, inside the main app.
Q 20Which Meta app, launched in July 2023 and requiring an Instagram account, was built to rival Twitter?
Threads
Threads reused the name of a 2019 Instagram messaging app that fewer than 0.1% of users tried, yet tens of millions joined the new one within days.
Q 24The 2018 scandal over which political data firm led Instagram to slash outside apps' access to its data?
Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica's scandal made Instagram switch off parts of its old developer API at once, instead of on the date it had planned, July 31, 2018.
Q 25The October 2021 outage that took down Instagram also knocked out which messaging app owned by the same company?
WhatsApp went dark for hours too, and some of the company's own staff reportedly couldn't get into buildings because their security badges stopped working.
Q 26Ireland's data regulator fined Instagram in 2022 over how it handled the data of which users?
Teenagers
Teenagers who switched to business accounts had their email addresses and phone numbers shown publicly, and the fine came to $402 million.
Q 27What did Instagram add in 2017 so people could hide posts instead of deleting ones that drew too few likes?
Archive
Archive also helped Instagram itself: posts deleted for getting too few likes took content off the platform, while hidden ones stayed.
Q 28What did millions of Instagram users post on June 2, 2020, to protest against racism and police brutality?
A black square
A black square: many were tagged #BlackLivesMatter, burying activists' updates under rows of identical black images.
Q 29Which country blocked Instagram in August 2024 amid a row over deleted condolence posts?
Turkey
Turkey's internet regulator gave no reason, but a top official had accused Instagram of blocking posts mourning Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Q 30Which Apple device finally got its own Instagram app in September 2025, about 15 years after launch?
iPad
iPad users waited so long that outside developers built their own apps for browsing Instagram on the tablet.