Mosseri says he used to think of those platforms as more “lean-back experiences,” but that’s changed in recent years. TikTok is now “every bit as participatory as we are at this point” and as YouTube has leaned into Shorts, it’s “brought them closer to us.” Mosseri notes that TikTok now has a friends tab, which a TikTok executive testified earlier in trial only accounts for about 1 percent of the videos viewed on the app.
In a January Reel, Mosseri announced a new feed within Instagram of videos their friends have liked in an effort to make sure Instagram is not just “a lean-back experience, but a participatory one, a social one.” It underscores how Instagram still sees connecting friends as a core experience on its app. Mosseri testifies he was distracted watching the video because “I’m mostly focusing on the one comment that said ‘definitely not a good idea.’”
In this 2024 video played in court, Mosseri explains that Instagram doesn’t plan to go after the long-form video market because it’s not as conducive to sharing and interacting with friends. Mosseri testifies that even today, “I still think friends are an important part of the experience.”
In an email thread from 2018, Mosseri checked in with Zuckerberg from paternity leave to try to communicate concerns the Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger had with strategy changes for the app. Mosseri wrote that after catching up with Systrom, it was “hard for me to get a read on what’s going on as the relationship is strained.” He told Zuckerberg, “The core tension seems to be twofold: (1) you believe slowing down Instagram will help more than some others do, and (2) your tolerance for handicapping Instagram is expectedly higher than the Instagram team’s.”
Zuckerberg told Mosseri in a 2018 email that even as Instagram grows to include more public entertainment posts, it “can never exclusively be for public figures or it will cease to be a social product.” Meta has been arguing that the social media market has changed so much that entertainment is a key focus of social apps including Instagram and TikTok, but the email suggests that at least at the time, Meta’s CEO felt that connecting with friends would always need to be remain a core use case.
The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel gets a shoutout in court when the government plays a clip of Mosseri’s January 2021 podcast interview. In the clip, Mosseri talks about joining Instagram and making changes to the safety and integrity operations. Mosseri says on the stand that he indeed “vaguely remember[s] talking to Nilay.” Here’s part of the transcript from the clip they played in court:
When I joined Instagram, I wasn’t running it. I was the head of product. I had come from running News Feed at Facebook for a number of years. And I told everybody I was going to be a sponge, and I wasn’t going to push for any change for a couple months while I ramped up and tried to better understand Instagram, the product, the employee base, and the values.
But the one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was on safety and integrity. I was pretty interested in the details, having spent the last couple of years being responsible for fake news on Facebook and a bunch of other gnarly safety problems.
I found for the most part that [Instagram was] just running our own stuff, and our team was tiny. And so I made the team pivot and essentially [integrate] the technology and work with the engineers who worked on safety across the rest of the company. I actually lost a bunch of people because of that. Not because they disagreed that it was a better way to keep people safe on Instagram over the long run, but it just wasn’t why they signed up to be on the team. So it was pretty painful for six months on that front. And I lost some credibility with some of the people.
But the team decided to make it a standalone app because they wanted to replicate how within Twitter, replies are as prominent as the original posts — something that’s not typically the case on Instagram. The group decided it would be too confusing to users to squeeze in this different model. “That was a very contentious decision internally,” Mosseri testifies.
That’s how Meta viewed the app when it was evaluating launching a competitor that would eventually be called Threads. The FTC is trying to use Meta’s internal evaluations of Twitter to show that it doesn’t see the primary reason for going to Twitter as connecting with friends and family — and therefore, it’s arguing, in a different market from the one it says Facebook and Instagram monopolize.
Mosseri says the app finds the most success in blending entertainment with interacting with friends. That could look like commenting on a public post about a sporting event and interacting with a friend in the comments, he says. That’s important since Meta noted in documents around 2018 that people were sharing less in their feeds, and public content was increasing. The FTC is trying to point out that even if posting to the apps has declined, there’s still friends and family interaction happening.
Meta, which purports to be a leader in AI, has been unable to stop the proliferation of deepfake advertisements impersonating Financial Times writer Martin Wolf on Facebook and Instagram. “Is it really that hard or are they not trying, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in her excellent book Careless People?” Wolf asks. There’s also a fairly incredible graph showing the number of deepfakes skyrocketing after the FT told Meta about the scam. This article isn’t behind FT’s paywall— and it’s definitely worth your time.
After the acquisition, Systrom says he informed his board that Twitter had decided to restrict access to part of its API, which allowed people to find their Twitter friends on Instagram. A Twitter executive “made it clear that this is in direct retaliation to Facebook cutting off the same API access to Twitter. I can only imagine Jack + Dick are also not very happy about the acquisition.”
Their feud also blocked Instagram link previews in tweets until it was resolved over backyard pizza in 2021.
Based on some of the ideas Mark has proposed over the years, Meta could have turned out very differently.
Prior to buying those nascent apps in 2012 and 2014, Facebook recognized both as significant competition, Federal Trade Commission attorney Daniel Matheson argues to open the government’s case.
The FTC will present evidence, such as emails from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the apps’ founders, and investors, allegedly showing that Instagram and WhatsApp would have grown without Facebook’s help, and that the company’s motive was to take potential rivals out of the market.
You can now skip ahead in Reels by holding down on either edge of the screen, which plays the video at double speed. Reels started out with a 15-second cap but can now run for up to three minutes, so playback controls make sense.
TikTok thought the same thing when it added a fast-forward feature, which you enable by... holding down on either edge of the screen. What a coincidence!
The company is getting rid of a feature it introduced less than a year ago that gave users the ability to leave semiprivate and disappearing comments on grid posts and Reels. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the feature wasn’t widely adopted, and that the platform has become “too complicated” over the years.
During his weekly AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged that “we really should build” a small-but-important feature that competitors like TikTok and YouTube offer: picture-in-picture (PIP). Maybe you’ll be able to multitask and watch reels soon.
Also, Instagram is working to improve its search feature this year — including the ability to search for content, not just other accounts.
Some Instagram users experienced an error within the last few days that flooded their personal Reels feeds with violent and NSFW imagery, some (but not all) of which was hidden behind content warnings.
Meta says it has since fixed the error and apologized for the mistake that exposed Reels users to content “that should not have been recommended” — which, according to 404Media, included footage of animal abuse, gun violence, dead bodies, and outright gore.
The livestreaming platform announced that this week, every channel will get the ability to edit and share clips straight to Instagram.
How useful that is for Twitch’s gaming-focused creators is up for debate, but with TikTok’s future in question, adding Instagram to the mix seems sensible.
From Alessandro Paluzzi, who recently posted screenshots of how writing Community Notes might look like on Threads, too.
