Facebook launches cross-platform messaging for Instagram, Messenger: How to use, change privacy settings and more

Cross-platform messaging: Social media giant Facebook has now launched its cross-platform messaging app Messenger for Instagram and Facebook. With this, Facebook users would be able to message someone on Instagram from Facebook itself, and vice versa. New features have also been added to the messenger, including selfie stickers, disappearing messages, chat colours and themes and custom emojis. However, users also have the option to disable cross-platform messaging if they wish to do so. In that case, the messengers would have the updated features but would continue to remain like the previous direct messaging apps.

There are also certain privacy concerns regarding this update. So here’s how you can enable cross-platform messaging and change privacy settings.

Facebook Instagram cross-app messaging: How to set up

• To set this up, the users must ensure they have the updated versions of the Facebook Messenger and Instagram apps.
• Users must open Instagram, go to Settings and then select Update Messaging. On the next screen that is displayed, they need to click on Update and link their Facebook accounts to the Instagram one.
• By default, the option for cross-platform messaging is enabled on Facebook. Moreover, the default profile is set to public, which allows any user from Instagram to look for the user’s contact and message them. This can be changed through settings.

Cross-platform messaging: Ensuring privacy

• Users must go through the following steps to change their privacy settings in the Facebook messenger.
• Go to Messenger app and click on the profile icon. This should be at the upper right corner of the screen.
• In the menu that appears, select Privacy and then go to the Message Delivery option.
• In relation to Instagram, there are three privacy settings that need to be set as per the user preference. For all of these settings, the user would have to choose one of the three options – Chat, Message Requests and Don’t Receive Requests. The settings are – Accounts you follow or have chatted with on Instagram, Your followers on Instagram and Others on Instagram.

With these preferences in place, Messenger would categorise messages from Instagram as the user wants.

For ensuring privacy on Instagram messaging, the following steps need to be ensured:

• Go to Settings and click on Privacy.
• Select Messages and then set your preferences for the three Facebook-related settings. The options remain the same here as well – Chats, Message Requests and Don’t Receive Requests. The three settings are – Facebook friends or people you have chatted with on Messenger, People with your phone number and Others on Facebook.