Instagram now tells you who cannot see a private post or story before you hit Send

Aside from rolling out suggested posts in your feed this morning (which is related to the content you already follow), Instagram today also launched another new feature which aims to prevent accidental sharing of private posts and stories to people in direct messages.

With this new feature, you can easily see who can or cannot see a private post or story before you hit that Send button. As evidenced by the included screenshot, a change in the interface for sharing a post as a direct message has added a new Private Account section.

Below that are listed accounts that cannot see your private post unless they follow you. Before this change, you could share a private post with someone using Instagram’s direct messaging feature but they were unable to see the content unless they follow the sender.

Instagram announced this feature quietly without a press release, via a tweet this morning.

This new feature is live now. Just like the Suggested Posts feature, it’s a server-side update so there’s no need to update your copy of the Instagram app on your iPhone.

Instagram for iPhone is a free download from the App Store.