Our research expands the methodological framework for collecting ephemeral content on social media platforms. By introducing the annotation plugin as a bypass for ethical concerns collecting private Instagram stories, we hope to inspire future research analyzing personal content on social media, especially ephemeral formats. If successful, our analysis will improve our understanding of Instagram stories and their use by political protagonists during the hot phase of an election campaign. Future work could compare the content of stories and posts to the users’ content on other platforms like Twitter. Further we would like to train a model for automated coding and large-scale analysis.