No, Instagram is not going to charge you for putting links in captions

According to a new tech patent filed by Facebook for “Adding paid links to media captions in a social networking system”, the tech giant might be looking into adding paid links to photo captions. However, Instagram says that it has no such plans. The patent was discovered by Protocol’s Mike Murphy and reported by The Verge.

The patent application was submitted by Facebook in 2016 and showed a pop-up appearing when a user adds a URL to a caption asking if he/she/they want to pay $2 to make the link live.

The patent application describes how this ‘paid link’ feature is supposed to work – if the online system detects the text context of the caption includes a “string of link text identifying an address”, the system will prompt the user to pay a fee in exchange for generating a link.