No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Riedel was hosting more InstaMeets to bring them together in real life. At one summer event in San Francisco, Rise introduced Instagram employees to one of their biggest fans: Jessica Zollman. Zollman worked at Formspring, an anonymous question-and-answer site popular among teens. The site had turned into a cesspool of bullying, as anonymous products usually did. Teens asked their schoolmates what they really thought, and whoever posted was told, often enough, that they were actually nasty and ugly and didn’t deserve to exist. Zollman was the one who handled the communication with the police or FBI when there was a threat of violence or suicide. Instagram was her escape from all this. At work, they called her the “Instagram queen,” making fun of her obsession. Her more artistic friends ridiculed her too, for calling herself a photographer even though she was using her phone to take photos. But she couldn’t help but love Instagram, which seemed like a happier, more creative place on the internet, in a way that felt revolutionary. She was pulling together a conference focused on mobile photography, called “1197,” after June 11, 1997, the day the first camera-phone photo was shared.