In a briefing with journalists on Thursday to launch the company\u2019s Algo Confessions series in Australia, Instagram\u2019s chief executive, Adam Mosseri, did not comment directly on the Albanese government proposal but said Instagram had a range of algorithms in operation. Those include ranking which friends\u2019 stories you see more often, or which users come up first in message suggestions based on interactions, as well as the algorithm that determines the content people see in their feeds.<\/p>\n
The launch of the series in Australia is the first outside the US. It features celebrities and influencers detailing how Instagram determines what content ends up in a user\u2019s feed, and how the user can have some control over that by adding or removing tags in their settings.<\/p>\n
Mosseri said just a \u201cvery vocal minority\u201d wants social media to go back to reverse chronological feeds, which he said would just incentivise people to post more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it turns out your friends post a lot less than creators, who post a lot less than brands and companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up for Guardian Australia\u2019s Politics, really newsletter here<\/a><\/p>\n He said people would be \u201coverwhelmed\u201d with content from brands, and creators and friends would be drowned out.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens is people become a bit less interested in the experience and they use it a lot less, which then means that there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n He said engagement and user satisfaction goes down.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s this interesting tension between what an individual might want and what happens when you actually explode that to the entire community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not to say that ranking is perfect, it\u2019s not, we make mistakes \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter | Every weekday<\/p>\n Sign up to Politics, really<\/p>\n Our political team brings you up to speed on the stories that really matter and what they mean for you<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Mosseri said Instagram\u2019s ranking algorithm \u201cfeels like a black box\u201d but was something Instagram was trying to give users more control over by opting out of certain topics in their recommendations.<\/p>\n He said in the future, Meta\u2019s AI models could eventually allow users to talk to the app to understand why they are seeing certain types of content.<\/p>\n Mosseri said he did not believe the app to be the clinical definition of \u201caddictive\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t believe Instagram is addictive \u2013 I know that is controversial to say \u2013 I do think we often in English anyway conflate the way we colloquially use the word addicted \u2026 like \u2018I\u2019m addicted to this show and I\u2019m binge watching it, which is not good for me\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n He said clinically defined addictions have withdrawal symptoms, while social media does not have that effect, and \u201cthose things are different\u201d.<\/p>\n Mosseri has made this claim before<\/a>. Research has found some users can have an impulse to use a platform without being fully aware of it, and evidence shows frequent engagement with algorithms \u201calters dopamine pathways\u201d that fosters dependency that is \u201canalogous to substance addiction\u201d.<\/p>\n In the landmark US court case centred on the addictive nature of Meta\u2019s products, the company\u2019s lawyer last month conceded to the court that it was \u201cno dispute\u201d people can struggle with social media, but the company has tools to address that. Meta later settled the case for US$18bn<\/a> while denying any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Instagram\u2019s chief executive has said users will have a worse experience in an algorithm-free world, seeing more brand-related…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99],"class_list":["post-886622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1789024460_967_Politics_really_trail_1x1.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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