If you're no longer seeing someone's stories on Instagram and want to know if they've hidden them from you, here is this article we'll show you how to find out. We'll also explain how you can view a story without being seen.
Most social networks allow you to set privacy settings that protect your safety and privacy. Instagram offers a range of privacy settings based on it's features. For example, you can make your account private, accessible only to friends, however you can also block your stories from those who are already following you. Finding out if someone has hidden their Instagram stories from you is very simple. There are two ways you can check, from your own account and by creating a new Instagram account.
To check using your current account, log into Instagram, go to search bar, and search the name of the user you suspect has blocked you. If you are unable to find them via the search bar, you have most likely been blocked from their account. This means that you cannot follow them or see their stories and content. If you can still access their profile but you never see any stories, it's possible that they have hidden their stories from you.
If you still have doubts about being hidden from their stories, you can also create a new Instagram account and search for the person you suspect has blocked you. If their account is private, you must wait for them to accept you to be sure if they are still active and publishing stories. If you can view their stories from your new Instagram account, you will know that this user has blocked your other account from viewing their stories.
If you want to see your friends' stories without them knowing (without appearing on their seen list), just open your Instagram account in airplane mode from your phone. This way you can browse stories and Instagram will not record that you have seen them, and you won't appear on the list of people that have viewed a story.
Need more help with Instagram? Check out our Forum!
So, you’re on Instagram and you have a suspicion that someone has blocked you from seeing their story. Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t tell you that someone has hidden you from their story.
Instagram released a story feature a few years ago which allowed your followers to view your story. depending on your privacy settings, either your followers could’ve watched your story, or your story would be available for the whole public to see.
Since some people want to limit who can see their stories and make certain things private so others won’t see, Instagram allowed people to hide their stories from certain followers. When blocking someone from seeing your story, they won’t be able to see your story.
You could be frustrated because you want to know if this person has a problem with you. Luckily for you, I’m going to show you a few ways to check if someone has hidden you from viewing their Instagram story.
Can You Tell If Someone Blocked You from Seeing Their Story on Instagram?
- Can You Tell If Someone Blocked You from Seeing Their Story on Instagram?
- If Someone Hides Their Story on Instagram, Can You See Their Highlights
- How to Tell If Someone Blocked You from Seeing Their Story on Instagram
- 1. Ask A Friend to Send you Their Story
- 2. Make a Quick Fake Account
- 3. Ask A Friend You’re With to Show you
- 4. Have They Stopped Posting For A While?
- 5. Ask Them If They Did
- 6. Use A Third Party Tool
- 7. Check Again
- They Could’ve Just Outright Blocked You On Instagram
- 1. Search for Their Username on Instagram
- 2. Find Them in a Tagged Photo
- 3. Look for Them in a Comment Section
- What Happens When Someone
Hides Their Story From You On Instagram
- You Can’t See Any Story They Post
- When Someone Sends The Story To You It’ll Be Unavailable
- How to See Hidden Stories on Instagram
- 1. Ask Them To Stop Hiding You
- 2. Get Your Friend To Show It to You
- 3. Use Your Private Account
- Can Someone Know If You Hide Them From Seeing Your Story?
- If You Hide Someone From Your Instagram Story After Posting
- Does Instagram ‘This Story Is unavailable’ Mean They Blocked You From Their Story?
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know who actually blocked you from seeing their story on Instagram because this would violate people’s privacy. Although their story is available for the rest of their followers, once they’ve hidden their story from you, there’s no possible way to see it.
If you’re wondering if your friend has blocked you from viewing their story, there’s no way to exactly know if they have. If they don’t post any stories, then this can make you suspicious because you might have come to the conclusion that they’ve blocked you from viewing it, however, just because someone doesn’t post stories anymore, doesn’t mean that they’ve blocked you from seeing their story.
However, the closest way to know if someone has hidden their story from you is to ask someone that follows them, ‘what stories have they posted’. From here, you’ll be able to know if they hid their story from you.
If Someone Hides Their Story on Instagram, Can You See Their Highlights
If someone hides their story from you on Instagram, you can still see their highlights. Their highlights are a staple piece that they put on their Instagram for everyone to see and you’re not allowed to block people from seeing your highlights. If they hid you from their story and put that story on their highlights 24 hours later, you’ll be able to see the highlights since Instagram doesn’t allow you to block people from seeing highlights.
How to Tell If Someone Blocked You from Seeing Their Story on Instagram
There are a few ways to tell if someone has blocked you from seeing their story. These are loopholes that you can use to find out, but there’s no way that you’ll be able to find out directly through your own Instagram account. You can only use other accounts to find out because they won’t be hidden from viewing stories.
1. Ask A Friend to Send you Their Story
The first thing you need to do is to ask a friend to send you the suspect’s Instagram story. If you think that you might have been one of the few people that were blocked, you could just ask a friend that you think wasn’t blocked. This friend would have to be following the person if their account is private.
If their account is open, you can just ask anyone to send you their story. When you receive their story via DM, you need to check whether you can see the story or not. If you’ve been blocked, you’re going to see a message saying that the story is unavailable. This means that this person has hidden their story from you.
2. Make a Quick Fake Account
The next thing you can do is to create a fake account.
When you make a fake account, you can use this to act like a different person and not as yourself. When you’re done with making the fake account, you can simply click on the person’s story and view their story if their account is open.
Related: How to Know Who’s Behind a Fake Account on Instagram
If you couldn’t see the story on your original Instagram account, this means that they’ve blocked you from seeing their story.
If their account is private, here’re some tips to make your account look real so you have more of a chance of getting accepted.
- Add up to 5 pictures
- Gain a few followers or buy 100 followers
- Make your account private
- Make your profile picture attractive
Once you’ve done this, you can send them a follow request and you can keep your fingers crossed to see if they accept your follow request. Once they’re accepted, you need to look at their story and check if you’re able to see it.
If you can, this means that you’ve been blocked.
3. Ask A Friend You’re With to Show you
If you’re with a friend that follows this person, then you can easily ask them for their phone to look at their account. When you check their account, and you see a story that you couldn’t see on your main account, this means that you’ve been blocked.
4. Have They Stopped Posting For A While?
Another way you can tell if they have blocked you from viewing their story is by checking their posting frequency. If they did use to post very frequently, let’s say every day, and they’ve suddenly stopped, this can lead you to believe that they have hidden their story from you.
Although they could’ve just stopped posting altogether, if they have posted frequently and consistently for many months and they suddenly stop for a few weeks, then it’s safe to make the assumption that they’ve hidden their story from you.
5. Ask Them If They Did
The easiest way to know if someone has blocked you from seeing their story is to simply ask them. It’s as simple as saying, did you block me from seeing your story. Obviously if they’re not a straight up person, then they might not tell you the truth and you’ll have to use other methods to try and find out if they did block you from seeing it.
But if they are honest, they’ll tell you that they blocked you from seeing it. Maybe they didn’t want you to see something that would upset you, or maybe they only wanted to post something for a certain group of people to see.
6. Use A Third Party Tool
Third party tools can be a lifesaver when it comes to problems like this and they can really help you find out if someone has hidden you from seeing their story. To know if this is the case, you need to remember the persons username so that you can put it into the search bar of the story viewer tool.
An Instagram story viewer tool allows you to view peoples stories without an account and without them knowing that you viewed it. For this to work, their account can’t be on private. It has to be public and there has to be a story there within the last 24 hours for you to be able to view it. To do this, you simply have to paste their username into the search bar and all the stories they’ve uploaded in the last 24 hours will show up.
From here, if you can see stories on here, but you can’t see them on their profile when you visit the Instagram app, then you’ll know that they’ve blocked you. Because the story viewer tool doesn’t use an account, it means that it can pull up peoples stories without them ever knowing. The plus side of this is that you can always use it to check public account stories because they can never be blocked.
7. Check Again
Sometimes there are glitches that can happen which can cause a story not to show up the first time. Glitches are failures in the software that causes some unexpected errors and in this case, someone has published a story but it hasn’t came up for you. In this situation, to know if they hid you from seeing their story, then you should check again.
You simply need to search for their name again and swipe down when you’re on their profile to update it. If you notice that there’s no red ring around their profile picture, then it’s safe to say that they’ve blocked you from seeing their stories.
They Could’ve Just Outright Blocked You On Instagram
If someone blocked you on Instagram, then it’s pretty similar to them blocking you from watch their stories before you won’t be able to watch them. Although blocking you entirely means that you don’t get to see their account outright, it also means that you won’t be able to see any stories that they upload.
1. Search for Their Username on Instagram
The first and most reliable way to find out if you’ve been blocked on Instagram is by checking if you can find their name in the search results.
When you search for someone’s Instagram username, their account usually comes up after typing the first few letters. This only works if you have any history with the account.
If you search up every part of their username on Instagram and they don’t show up, you’ve been blocked – this only happens if their account is on private.
If you search for their name and you find their account, but you see a message on their profile saying, ‘No Posts Yet’, you’ve been blocked. This means that you won’t be able to watch their stories too.
2. Find Them in a Tagged Photo
The next thing you can do to find out if you’ve been blocked is by looking for their tagged username in a picture. You can do this by going on their best friends’ Instagram account and looking for a photo that includes both of them.
If they have tagged the person you think may have blocked you, you need to click on their tag and check if you can see their pictures.
If you see the term No Post Yet, they’ve unfortunately blocked you and you won’t be able to see their stories.
3. Look for Them in a Comment Section
If you can’t find a tagged picture of them, you can try and look for their profile in a comment section. If you know that they follow someone, or you know a post that they’ve commented on, you can go back to that post and look for their username.
If you’ve found their username underneath a picture, you can click on their name and check if they’ve blocked you.
If they did block you, you’re going to see the message ‘user not found’ when you click on their profile and you won’t be able to see any stories that they upload.
What Happens When Someone Hides Their Story From You On Instagram
When someone hides their story from you on Instagram, there are a few things that you’re going to notice. Instagram gives clues all the time and it’s hard to not realize something when it’s happened. Along with noticing weird things when someone has hidden you, if you go digging deeper, it’s actually easy to find out that they’ve blocked you from seeing it. It’s not something that takes a genius to figure out.
You Can’t See Any Story They Post
If someone has blocked you, one thing that you’ll notice off the bat is that it doesn’t seem like they post any stories at all. If someone has gone from posting loads to posting less, then you’ll know that something could be going on.
It’s not always the case that as soon as someone is no longer active that they’ve blocked you from seeing their story. But if you notice that someone is very active then one day they suddenly stop posting, it should lead you to investigate more about the situation. This is more apparent if it’s someone you’re relatively close with and you notice that you haven’t see a story from them in ages.
When Someone Sends The Story To You It’ll Be Unavailable
If you have a close friendship group, you’ll usually have an Instagram group chat. With the group chat, usually, things are sent into the chat mainly about mutual friends. If you notice that someone has sent something into the group chat and it’s about someone all of you know about, you may notice that you’re unable to see the story.
If you notice that you’re unable to see the story that they sent it, then this is a sign that you’ve been blocked from watching their stories. This is something major you’ll notice when someones hides their stories from you.
How to See Hidden Stories on Instagram
If someone has hidden their story from you, there’s no way you can use the account that they blocked, to see their hidden story. This would be a massive violation of privacy if there was a way to see a story that someone hid you from. Once they’ve hidden you from a story, it’s impossible to see their story using that account again.
1. Ask Them To Stop Hiding You
If you want to start seeing someones stories again, the quickest route to get there would be to ask them to stop hiding you. When you ask them to stop hiding you from their stories, one of two things will happen.
They’re going to deny that they every hid their story from you, or going to deny that they’ve hidden you but they’ll remove you from the list of people they’ve blocked from watching it. In rare cases do they admit that they blocked you before unblocking you – this is if they think you don’t know about it.
2. Get Your Friend To Show It to You
Another easy when to see stories again when you’ve been hidden is to ask your friend to screenshot or screen record whats on their instagram.
Beacuse you’re blocked, they can’t just send you the story because you’ll be unable to see it. But you can get them to show you whats on their story without sending it.
3. Use Your Private Account
If you have a private account and their account is public, you can use this to take a quick peak and whats on their story. With a private account, you’re able do things on instagram without revealing that it’s you. Along with this, they may have only thought to block you from seeing their story on your main account but with their burner or their private account, chances are that it’s not blocked.
Can Someone Know If You Hide Them From Seeing Your Story?
There’s no way that people can find out that you’ve blocked them from viewing their story. However, they can use certain methods to find out that you’ve hidden them from your story, such as asking a friend that follows you to show them or asking a friend that follows you to send it to them.
If they can see that you posted a story using their friend’s account and they can’t view it from their own account, this will let them know that you’ve blocked them from seeing it. If their friend that follows you sends your story to them, and it says ‘Story Unavailable’, this will let them know that you’ve hidden them from viewing your stories.
If You Hide Someone From Your Instagram Story After Posting
If you hide someone from your Instagram story after posting, they’ll still be able to see the stories that you’ve uploaded before that. They won’t be able to see any stories that are posted after you block them. If you don’t want someone to see your stories, make sure that you block them before you upload them. They’ll still be able to see any stories that were uploaded before.
Does Instagram ‘This Story Is unavailable’ Mean They Blocked You From Their Story?
If you see the ‘This story is unavailable‘ error, it doesn’t mean that someone blocked you from viewing their story, however, there is a chance that this message is showing because someone has blocked your account. If this is the case, it means that they blocked you once you visited the app so there hasn’t been a period for you to refresh the app so their profile can disappear. To check this is the case, you need to refresh the app and visit their profile. If you haven’t been blocked, then you can put the cause of the message down to the reasons mentioned above.