On October 6, 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing app distinguished by its square format and vintage-style filters. It gained 25,000 users on its first day and 1 million within two months. Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. The platform fundamentally altered visual culture — it made everyone a photographer, created the "influencer" as a career category, and reshaped industries from fashion to food to travel. Instagram Stories (borrowed from Snapchat in 2016) and Reels (competing with TikTok in 2020) kept the platform evolving. By the mid-2020s, Instagram had over 2 billion monthly users and had become the primary platform for brand marketing and visual self-expression.
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