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Marco Berardi, creator of the Instagram Stories feature, is reportedly elated they are finally being used for their original purpose of empathetic engagement with the world’s thorniest geopolitical issues.
“I was absolutely dismayed when I released this tool just for people to post pink-filtered boomerangs of their dogs,” said Berardi, who designed ‘Stories’ for scrupulously thought-out discussions on uniquely complex conflicts. “Stories’s interactive stickers, filters, and GIFs, create the ideal platform for measured takes on global conflict.”
“It’s liberating knowing that everyone has finally arrived to a forum designed for engagement with these kinds of issues,” continued Berardi, scrolling through stories expressing all sorts of nuanced takes on world events that took decades to arrive at the current point. “‘Stories’ was never about your friends, it was about geopolitics and that’s why you have a 125-character limit and they disappear after 24 hours.”
At press time, universities designed for open-debate and thought on these issues are doing their best to sit this one out.
