Do we need permission to display Instagram UGC on a website?

You don’t need permission to embed and display public, user-generated content from Instagram on any website, mobile app, or digital screen.

When a user signs up for an Instagram account, they agree to Instagram’s terms and conditions. Here’s how Instagram’s terms describe permissions given to them:

"We do not claim ownership of your content, but you grant us a licence to use it.

Nothing is changing about your rights in your content. We do not claim ownership of your content that you post on or through the Service and you are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you choose. However, we need certain legal permissions from you (known as a "licence") to provide the Service. When you share, post or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (such as photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This licence will end when your content is deleted from our systems. You can delete content individually or all at once by deleting your account."

Embedding Instagram posts ('publicly perform or display') on a website is one of the distribution mechanisms, allowing anyone to add Instagram images and videos to a website. To demonstrate this, open a public Instagram post and click the three dots on the desktop view. There you’ll find an 'Embed' button and the embed code for any website and digital service.

With Flockler, you can automate the embedding process and gather and display Instagram UGC at scale. That’s because Meta (including Instagram and Facebook) has a developer partner agreement and Platform Terms for third-party software companies like Flockler. As a part of the partner application process, third-party developers need to describe their use case in detail to the Meta partnership team. Also, the Meta developer team is given access to the software, and they monitor the usage of the third-party software closely.

When do you need permission from the user?

Without permission, you are not allowed to:

• Display images and videos that are private (Flockler won’t allow you to access them).

• Modify images and videos in any way.

• Copy and re-publish UGC images or videos on your social media profile.

If you have any questions regarding this help page or Flockler features in general, don’t hesitate to send us a message via live chat.