Preserving the Ephemeral: Instagram Story Archiving with the Tidal Tales Plugin

TL;DR

This work addresses the challenge of collecting ephemeral Instagram Story data for social science research, where retrospective access is limited and typical scraping risks account bans. It introduces the Tidal Tales Plugin, a Firefox extension that intercepts browser network requests to download story media and metadata locally as researchers browse, enabling prospective data collection for both private and public accounts. The approach yields rich metadata and media exports, supports highlight-based data extension, and offers open-source, privacy-conscious deployment for long-term, scalable studies. These contributions improve data access and integrity for Web Science analyses while emphasizing ethical considerations and potential future enhancements such as anonymization.

Abstract

We introduce the Tidal Tales Plugin, a Firefox extension for efficiently collecting and archiving of Instagram stories, addressing the challenges of ephemeral data in social media research. It enables an automated collection of story metadata and media files without risking account bans. It contributes to Web Science by facilitating expansive, long-term studies with enhanced data access and integrity.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: A screenshot of the tool: The plugin runs inside Firefox. When watching stories, media files and metadata are downloaded in the background. All files are saved to the local file system. Additionally, the metadata can be exported as a CSV file.