For years the answer to this question was a list of workarounds: turn off your Wi-Fi, read from the notification, restrict the person, install something. All of that existed because Instagram gave you no way to switch read receipts off.
It does now, in two places, and one of them behaves in a way that catches people out – a setting you make inside a single conversation is not overridden when you later change the account-wide one.
This covers both switches, the precedence rule between them, what you give up by turning them off, and why the old tricks are not worth the effort any more.
Key Takeaways
The Two Settings
Instagram’s page on managing read receipts describes both. Which one you want depends on whether this is about one person or about everybody.
For a Single Conversation
Open Messages, open the chat, tap the name at the top, then Privacy & safety, then the Read receipts toggle. Switching it off stops that person seeing when you have read their messages, and changes nothing anywhere else.
This is the right scope for most of the reasons people search for this. It is usually one conversation that prompts it, not a change of policy.
It is reversible at any time
Nothing is lost by trying it. The toggle goes back the way it came, and past messages are unaffected either way.
Group chats count as one chat
The setting applies to the conversation, so in a group it covers everyone in it rather than individual members.
They are not told
No notification is sent when you change it. The only signal is the absence of Seen from that point on.
For Every Conversation
From your profile, open the Menu, then under How others can interact with you choose Messages and story replies, then Show read receipts, then the Read receipts toggle.
This applies across the account. It is the heavier option and worth thinking about, because it also removes a signal you may rely on. The same settings area controls who can message you at all – our guide to Instagram DM requests covers that side.
Phone Only
Instagram notes the feature is not available on computers. A good share of “I cannot find this setting” is somebody looking in the web app, where it genuinely is not.
The Precedence Rule
Worth its own section because it is unintuitive and Instagram spells it out with an example of its own.
Per-Chat Wins
A read receipts setting you make inside a particular conversation is not affected by later changes to the account-wide setting. Instagram’s own illustration: turn read receipts on for one chat, then go to settings and turn them off for all chats, and that one chat still has them on.
So the global switch is not a master override. It is a default that individual conversations can escape, permanently, until you go back into that conversation and change it.
Why That Trips People
Somebody turns receipts off account-wide, assumes they are now invisible everywhere, and is still showing as Seen in the one conversation they had previously adjusted by hand. The setting is working exactly as documented; the expectation was wrong.
If being consistently off matters, check the individual chats you have fiddled with rather than trusting the global toggle alone.
What You Give Up
The part worth deciding before switching anything, because it is not a one-way benefit.
It Works in Both Directions
Read receipts are a shared signal. Turn yours off and you also stop being able to tell whether the people affected have read what you sent.
For an argument you are avoiding, that is a fair price. For a conversation where you are waiting on an answer, it removes the only information you had.
It Does Not Hide That You Were Online
Read receipts and activity status are separate settings controlling separate things. Switching one off does nothing about the other, and people frequently change one and wonder why the other still shows.
It Is Not Secrecy
The absence of Seen is itself information to anyone paying attention, particularly if it changed recently. This setting removes a timestamp; it does not make reading a message undetectable in any social sense.
The Old Workarounds
Still circulating widely, mostly in articles written before the setting existed. Two are harmless and obsolete, one is heavy-handed, one is genuinely risky.
Airplane Mode and Disconnecting
The classic: load the inbox, cut your connection, read, then close the app before reconnecting. It worked by stopping the app reporting back, it was easy to get wrong, and there is now a toggle that does the same thing reliably.
Reading From the Notification
Still works and still produces no receipt, because you never open the conversation. It also still shows only a preview, so it answers “is this urgent” and nothing longer than that.
Worth knowing as a glance rather than as a strategy – and if you open the chat afterwards, the receipt fires as normal.
Restricting the Person
Restrict does move somebody’s messages aside quietly, and it does hide your activity from them. It also changes the whole shape of the relationship to achieve one narrow thing, which the per-chat toggle now does precisely. Our guide to blocking messages on Instagram covers what restrict actually does.
Third-Party Readers
Apps and sites offering to let you read DMs without triggering receipts need access to your account, which means your login. Instagram’s page on accounts restricted for data scraping names handing credentials to a third-party app or website among the behaviours that get an account flagged.
That was a bad trade when there was no alternative. With a native setting available, it is simply not a question worth asking.
Related Signals, and Which Setting Controls Them
These get confused with each other constantly, and changing the wrong one is why people think the setting failed.
| What you want to hide | Where it lives | Note |
|---|---|---|
| That you read a message | Read receipts | Per chat, or account-wide |
| That you are online now | Activity status | A separate setting entirely |
| That you viewed a story | Nothing – viewers are always listed | No setting exists for this |
| That you screenshotted a story | Nothing is notified anyway | Disappearing chat media is the exception |
| A message you already sent | Unsend | Removes it for everyone; cannot be undone |
| A whole conversation, for you | Delete chat | Only clears your copy, not theirs |
Our guide to unsending a message on Instagram covers the last two rows, including why neither can be recovered afterwards.
If This Is a Business Inbox
The calculation changes when the messages are customers rather than friends, and it usually points the other way.
Leave Them On
For a business account read receipts are a feature, not an exposure. A customer who can see their message was read waits more patiently than one staring at silence, and the Seen marker buys you time that an unanswered message does not.
The Real Problem Is Usually Speed
People turn receipts off on a business account for one reason: messages are being read and not answered, and the Seen marker makes that visible. That is a response-time problem wearing a privacy costume, and hiding the evidence does not fix it. Our guide to messaging a company on Instagram shows what that silence looks like from the customer’s side.
DMpro addresses the actual issue – it connects through Instagram’s official API and answers the questions that repeat the moment they arrive, passing anything unusual to a person with the conversation attached. Our guide to Instagram DM CRM covers organising the inbox behind it.
What No Tool Does
Nothing legitimate reads your DMs without triggering receipts, recovers messages somebody deleted or unsent, or sends unsolicited DMs at volume. An earlier version of this article claimed all three, and all three were wrong.
Seen Only Hurts When Nothing Follows It
A read receipt on a business account is a promise with a clock attached. The customer knows you read it, and every minute after that is a minute they spend wondering.
DMpro closes that gap: it recognises the questions that keep arriving, replies the moment they land through Instagram’s official connection, and brings a colleague into anything unusual with the exchange already in front of them.
- Replies that arrive in seconds, not hours
- Triggers on messages, comments and story replies
- Official API connection, so your login stays yours
- Customer details captured as the conversation runs
- One inbox across Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok and Telegram
- Seen is followed by an answer, not silence
- Nothing waits overnight because nobody was online
- No credentials handed to any third party
- It does not hide read receipts or activity status
- The repeating answers need writing properly once
Conclusion
The question that brought you here has a direct answer now: open the chat, tap the name, Privacy and safety, Read receipts. Or do it for the whole account from Messages and story replies. No airplane mode, no third-party app, and nothing that puts your login anywhere.
Remember the precedence rule while you do it. A setting made inside one conversation stays as you left it, whatever you change account-wide afterwards – which is why some people switch everything off and still show as Seen in one place.
And weigh the trade honestly. Read receipts are mutual, so turning them off also removes your own ability to see whether messages have landed. On a personal account that is often worth it. On a business account it rarely is, because the real problem there is almost never the marker – it is how long it sits there before anyone replies.
Instant replies on the official API, so the read receipt is good news.
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