Reach, from narrowest to widest
A chat message goes to the people in that conversation and nobody else. It is the narrowest thing you can do and the right default for anything you would not want forwarded.
A story is visible to the audience you have chosen for stories, and it expires. Expiry limits how long something is discoverable; it does not limit who can screenshot it while it is up.
A post or reel is the widest. If your account is public, assume the audience is the public and the lifetime is indefinite.
Reshares change the audience, not the content
When something you posted is reshared, it reaches an audience you did not choose. That is the point of resharing, and it is also the thing to think about before posting.
Authors control whether their content may be reshared. If you are sharing something you would not want travelling, turn resharing off at the source rather than relying on the goodwill of everyone who sees it.
Resharing into chat is deliberately narrower than resharing onward publicly — the same privacy logic as above, applied to other people's content.
The forwarding test
Before sharing anything, ask what happens if it is forwarded once beyond the audience you pictured. If that outcome is fine, the surface you chose is fine.
If it is not fine, the answer is a narrower surface — not a carefully worded caption. Captions do not travel as reliably as media does.
Common questions
- Does an expiring story mean it is gone?
- It is no longer shown to viewers, which is not the same as being unrecoverable. Anyone who saw it could have captured it. Expiry reduces exposure; it does not undo it.
- Can I stop something being reshared?
- You can turn resharing off for your own content. Once something has already been reshared, that copy exists in its new context.