Instagram's chief executive, Adam Mosseri, has said users would have a worse experience in an algorithm-free world, seeing more brand-related content and spending less time on the app. His comments come as the Australian government plans to give users the option to opt out of algorithms, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announcing plans on Tuesday to require social media platforms to prompt users to choose between a feed of algorithm-recommended content or a reverse chronological feed of the pages they follow.
Mosseri's remarks on algorithm-free feeds
In a briefing with journalists on Thursday to launch the company's Algo Confessions series in Australia, Mosseri did not comment directly on the Albanese government proposal but said Instagram had a range of algorithms in operation. These include ranking which friends' stories users see more often, which users come up first in message suggestions based on interactions, and the algorithm that determines the content people see in their feeds.
Mosseri said just a “very vocal minority” wants social media to go back to reverse chronological feeds, which he said would incentivise people to post more. “What ends up happening is the best way to get more reach is just to post more often and those who can afford to post the most often do and then therefore get the most reach,” he said. “And it turns out your friends post a lot less than creators, who post a lot less than brands and companies.”
Impact on user experience and engagement
He said people would be “overwhelmed” with content from brands, and creators and friends would be drowned out. “What happens is people become a bit less interested in the experience and they use it a lot less, which then means that there's less reach to go around and people start to get more and more mad about the fact that their reach is going down because the overall pie gets smaller.”
He said engagement and user satisfaction goes down. “It's this interesting tension between what an individual might want and what happens when you actually explode that to the entire community,” he said. “That's not to say that ranking is perfect, it's not, we make mistakes – one of the things that frustrates me about ranking is that we end up over-optimising for things that we can measure and undervaluing things that are more difficult to measure.”
Instagram's algorithm transparency and future AI
Mosseri said Instagram's ranking algorithm “feels like a black box” but was something Instagram was trying to give users more control over by opting out of certain topics in their recommendations. He said in the future, Meta's AI models could eventually allow users to talk to the app to understand why they're seeing certain types of content.
The launch of the Algo Confessions series in Australia is the first outside of the US. It features celebrities and influencers detailing how Instagram determines what content ends up in a user's feed, and how the user can have some control over that by adding or removing tags in their settings.
Addiction debate and legal context
Mosseri said he didn't believe the app to be the clinical definition of “addictive”. “I don't believe Instagram is addictive – I know that is controversial to say – I do think we often in English anyway conflate the way we colloquially use the word addicted… like 'I'm addicted to this show and I'm binge watching it which is not good for me'.” He said clinically-defined addictions have withdrawal symptoms, while social media doesn't have that effect, and “those things are different”.
In the landmark US court case centred on the addictive nature of Meta's products, the company's lawyer last month conceded to the court that it was “no dispute” people can struggle with social media, but the company has tools to address that. Meta later settled the case for US$18bn while denying any wrongdoing.
