Instagram influencers discovered a new way to increase their number of followers. This technique is called mass story viewing (or mass story looking). Have you ever seen Russian Instagram accounts with thousands of followers watching your insignificant stories?

This method has become popular because contrary to follow-unfollow or spam comments, mass looking is not known to be very sanctioned by Instagram (Instagram can suspend or delete your account if there are suspicious activities).

A real business has emerged around the mass story viewing. For example, I’ve seen a site that offers mass looking services for $155 per month. It’s very expensive and not accessible for everyone.

Today we will see how to write a cheap (free) and accessible script for everyone (you still need to know how to program) using Python3 and its instabot library.

User targeting

Before start, you need to connect instabot to your Instagram account with :

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import instabot

bot = instabot.Bot()

bot.login(username=YOUR_USERNAME, password=YOUR_PASSWORD)



Our first goal is to obtain a list of users who might potentially be interested in our content. There are many filter to target users on Instagram :

by location: 1

bot.get_geotag_users(LOCATION)



by hashtag: 1

bot.get_hashtag_users(HASHTAG)



by a user followers: 1

bot.get_user_followers(USER_ID)



All these methods return a list of the user ids targeted by the filter.

Story viewing

instabot really makes story viewing easier with the method bot.watch_users_reels(USER_ID) , which takes a user id as a parameter and returns a boolean that represents the success of the viewing.

It’s therefore very easy to combine user targeting with story viewing taking the hashtag filter:

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for id in bot.get_hashtag_users( "hashtag" ):

bot.watch_users_reels(id)



I’ve written a complete script to target users for a clothing store, with a cool console display to impress your friend :

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import instabot

import time

from os import system, name



def clear () :

if name == 'nt' :

_ = system( 'cls' )



else :

_ = system( 'clear' )



HASHTAGS = [ 'fashion' , 'style' , "model" , "shopping" , "dress" ]

SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_MAIN_LOOP = 5 * 60

SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_HASHTAG_LOOP = 60

USERNAME = YOUR_USERNAME

PASSWORD = YOUR_PASSWORD



bot = instabot.Bot()



bot.login(username=USERNAME, password=PASSWORD)





while True :

try :

for hashtag in HASHTAGS :

clear()



users = bot.get_hashtag_users(hashtag)

for id in users:



if bot.watch_users_reels(id):

bot.logger.info( f'Instagram user: {id} , Total stories viewed: {bot.total[ "stories_viewed" ]} ' )

bot.logger.info( f'Sleeping for {SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_HASHTAG_LOOP} seconds...' )

time.sleep(SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_HASHTAG_LOOP)

bot.logger.info( f'Sleeping for {SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_MAIN_LOOP} seconds...' )

time.sleep(SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_MAIN_LOOP)



except Exception as e:

bot.logger.info(e)

time.sleep(SLEEP_TIME_BETWEEN_MAIN_LOOP)



It’s a script that can run on a machine 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to watch thousands upon thousands of stories and has rest periods to avoid detection of suspicious activity by Instagram. You can also use a proxy to avoid problems with your account.

Very short article but I hope that it can save people from spending their money on mass looking through overpriced services…