The questionable new ways to surveil your friends

In the summer of 2025, Meta rolled out Instagram Plus, a $3.99 monthly subscription that includes features like the ability to watch someone’s story without them knowing you looked, a search bar to find specific names in your story-viewer list, and the option to create multiple private story audiences. Tatum Hunter, a journalist covering digital privacy and internet culture, joined the show to explain what these features really say about how people use the app—and what Meta is betting on when it monetizes the shadiest impulses of its user base.

The desire path to a paid product

Hunter describes Instagram Plus as a classic example of a company responding to what users were already doing, often in ways the app wasn't designed for. She compares it to a “desire path”—the unofficial dirt trails worn across a lawn by people taking the most direct route, which landscape architects eventually pave. Instagram saw users scrolling endlessly through story views to check if a specific person had looked, creating fake accounts to follow someone surreptitiously, or whittling their Close Friends list down to a single crush to send them a private message disguised as a public story. Instead of discouraging these behaviors, Meta packaged them into a paid tier. “They see you creepy little weirdos,” Hunter says. “They see everything you do, and they're going to build features to legitimize a