The only major account I currently follow with my private account is Bas Smit. This is clearly one of the accounts used for this. Do you follow Bas too? Then you probably recognize this problem.
In the group chat they try to get you to click on a link. That link leads to advertising or the request to pay to see certain content. The (people behind the) bots then receive an amount based on the number of clicks they have achieved.
Yay, there is a way to turn off these message requests for group chats. At least: for company accounts. On your personal account, it is only possible to turn off the notifications of these group requests. How do you do that?
Personal account settings
In the Instagram app, go to 'Settings', then click on 'Notifications' and then on 'Direct Messages'. If you then scroll down a bit you will see the option 'Group Requests' appear. Here you can check the box next to 'Off'.
In the screenshot you can also see an example of the messages that you will no industry email list longer receive from that moment on. The example here is 'johnappleseed wants to add janeappleseed to your group'. It is a pity that this only concerns the notifications and that you cannot unsubscribe from unwanted group conversations. Unwanted group conversations will therefore, even after this setting, still appear as 'message request' in your DM box.
Instagram settings in your personal account.
Company account settings
Fortunately, Instagram offers an additional option for business accounts. In the Instagram app, go to 'Settings', then click on 'Privacy' and then on 'Messages'. Then, under 'Allow others to add you to groups', you can check the box next to 'Only people you follow'.
Instagram settings in your business account.
Hopefully this setting will also remove your irritation.
Captions sticker: automatically caption Stories
Instagram is testing a new Story sticker: the Captions sticker. A super handy sticker that captions your Stories in a jiffy.
We all know by now that it is useful to subtitle your videos. This applies not only to your Stories on Instagram, but to all videos on all social media channels. This increases the accessibility of your videos enormously. In addition, your videos can be watched without the user having to turn on the sound.
Until now, subtitling your Stories has been a time-consuming task. Although there are many useful tools and websites that can help you with this. But using an external tool is of course an extra step.
Instagram is currently testing this sticker with four different styles, as you can see in this video: