No, you don’t suddenly work for Meta or Instagram. But if you’ve tried posting today from an iPhone, you might have noticed the appearance of a new toggle labeled “(Meta-only) Internal post.” And you might have tried said toggle, only to find that it doesn’t do anything but keep your post from actually posting, throwing an error in your feed instead.
These things happen.
What you’re almost certainly seeing is what’s known as dogfooding — when internal testing tools meant to be used by developers and other folks within a company accidentally surface in an application in a production app. The app — I’m showing version 349.0.0 — was last updated a day ago, but it’s not uncommon for features to be surfaced server-side. So it’s possible this little toggle switch may disappear just as mysteriously as it appeared.
You’ll see the little toggle switch when you get to the screen that allows you to leave a caption on a photo, just above the section that lets you tag people or add music. If you flip the switch to on and try to post, you’ll be hit with a message on your feed that reads “Something went wrong. Please try again later,” with buttons to either retry the post or just dismiss the notification. You can retry the post all you want, but nothing magically happens. It just continues to fail.
After failing to upload, you’ll find in your notifications a note that says “You are creating media that will be gated to IG-only or Meta-only but you are not considered an employee or test user that can set the flag. Please check your gating and try again.” That definitely checks out with this being a dogfooding error, and the toggle likely will go away pretty quickly.
It was fun while it lasted.
