No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

There was also “inspire creativity,” which meant Instagram was going to try to frame the app as an artistic outlet, training its own users and highlighting the best of them through an editorial strategy, focusing on content that was genuine and meaningful. This was a rejection of the self-promotional fakery that was already starting to define some of Instagram’s popular accounts.

Zollman and White would get into fights about the return on investment for user outreach, to the point that Zollman quit before her one-year bonus time, sensing that her contributions were no longer valued. And she had other reasons too: the shuttle commute, the fact that she couldn’t bring her dog to the office, that employees were no longer hanging out like they used to. Mostly, she hated Facebook’s metrics-based employee review process. How could she show she was driving growth if she was just in charge of inspiring people?

Systrom thought about his counterparts at other acquired companies. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online shoe business Zappos, hadn’t gotten to remain in Jeff Bezos’s orbit after Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009. YouTube’s founders weren’t even relevant to YouTube anymore—they’d left the company after the 2006 Google acquisition.

Systrom had never met anyone as tactical as Zuckerberg. He wanted to learn Zuckerberg’s ways, but also to assert that he was a CEO—one of the good ones—in his own right, in a way that didn’t have to be so aggressive. His next move would appeal to Zuckerberg, helping him see Instagram as a useful partner. But Instagram on its own was not enough to satisfy Zuckerberg’s zeal for industry domination.

Once they were together in person, Zuckerberg abandoned the flattery and went straight to threats. He spent the meeting insinuating that Snapchat would be crushed by Facebook unless they found a way to work together. He was about to launch Poke, an app that would allow people to send disappearing photos, just like they did on Snapchat. He was not afraid to completely copy their product, putting all of the power of Facebook behind making it a success.

Facebook had copied Snapchat’s functionality but they had failed to copy the app’s cool factor. They were facing the same problem they’d had when trying to build a camera app that copied Instagram.

The ordeal confirmed Spiegel’s suspicions that Facebook was for the olds, and would one day fade into being the next Yahoo! or AOL. He wanted to be nothing like them. He banned employees from using words like “share” and “post” that reminded him of Facebook, since Snapchat was about being more personal, and preferred using a term like “send” instead.

In order to launch the advertising business, Instagram had to dodge an uncomfortable reality: advertising agencies hated Facebook. Teddy Underwood, an early Facebook employee who had just transitioned to Instagram to promote its new advertising products, thought the only way to sell them was to make a case that Instagram was the anti-Facebook.

“Trying to sell Hollywood on why this would be valuable was pretty difficult,” Kutcher remembers. “It’s not great as an actor for people to know who you are as a person, because it makes it harder for them to imagine you as a character.” But Kutcher thought it was inevitable that in the digital age even movie stars would have to stop being so mysterious, because eventually casting decisions would be swayed by the ability to bring an audience to a movie, like he could with his Twitter followers.

But while Systrom immersed himself in celebrity culture, he could also be clueless about it. A short brunette woman at the party explained that while she loved using Instagram, she thought it was pressuring young people, who could be quite mean to each other online. Because the stars had much bigger follower counts, the app’s upsides and downsides stood out to the extreme. She could see her fans getting bullied in the comments for her photos—something Instagram didn’t have a solution for. “And what is it that you do?” Systrom asked, his six-foot-five frame hovering over hers. She took out her phone to show him her Instagram profile. She was a pop star with about 8 million followers, and her name was Ariana Grande.

Public re-sharing was such a popular request that other entrepreneurs built apps like Regrann and Repost to attempt to fill the need, but these were no substitute for an in-app function. This made it harder to get noticed, but in some ways made it easier to build a personal brand. All your posts were yours. That was what the founders wanted.

During rehearsal, DeGeneres saw a seat labeled with Meryl Streep’s name, near the aisle in the third row. It gave her the idea that if she could get Streep involved, her selfie would be even more exciting. Representatives from Samsung, a major sponsor for the Oscars, watched her practice her lines and heard her mention the plan. They jumped on the opportunity, calling an ad executive at Twitter to ensure that if DeGeneres posted, she wouldn’t use her personal iPhone and instead a Samsung one. The team presented her with a tray of Samsung options the morning of the event, all selfie-ready.

But Kevin Systrom thought leaning too heavily on Facebook would be dangerous. He did want to be big, but he didn’t want to be Facebook. He wanted to recruit the best talent, but didn’t want them to bring over Facebook’s grow-at-all-costs values. Instagram, still tiny by comparison, was surrounded by Facebook’s culture.

Unlike Facebook, where employees looked for technical solutions that reached the most users, Instagram solved problems in a way that was intimate, creative, and relationship-based, sometimes even at the individual level if the user was important enough to warrant it.

Cyrus loved the idea and decided to keep using the app, even though Instagram lacked a broad solution to bullying.

Jenner had to reveal that she used temporary cosmetic fillers to achieve the effect, spurring several more news cycles.

Liz Perle, the head of teens, had an idea of how Instagram could use the controversy as an opening to promote a more positive message. She sent Jenner a list of ten names of Instagram users who had been vocal about their various body-related concerns. She proposed a campaign where Jenner interviewed these people, then shared their stories on her account, with the hashtag #iammorethan, a sentence that could be completed, as in “#iammorethan my lips.”

Facebook had proved that the bigger a network became, the bigger the unintended consequences of its decisions. Instagram wanted to borrow what was working without making the same mistakes. Facebook, now with more than 1.4 billion users, had shaped the goals of people and businesses in such a way that everyone was tailoring their content to achieve the top reward on the social network: going viral.

But cracks in Instagram’s careful, relationship-based plan were starting to show. As more users joined Instagram, the small team became more disconnected from the experience of the average person. For every Cyrus and Jenner, there were millions of others who would never know what it was like to have their concerns heard by an Instagram employee. The ratio was now something like one employee for every 1.5 million users.

Systrom wanted Facebook-size success. He also wanted to avoid cheapening anything about the product, ruining what it stood for. But Instagram was growing so quickly, he couldn’t have it both ways. Mark Zuckerberg made that very clear to him—first with the advertising business.

In the fall of 2015, Ira Glass hosted an episode of This American Life on National Public Radio called “Status Update.” It opened with three girls, 13 and 14 years old, explaining how Instagram was putting pressure on their entire social lives.

Systrom was unmoved. “We will not ever have Stories,” he said. “We shouldn’t—we can’t—and it doesn’t fit with the way people think and share on Instagram.” Snapchat was a totally different thing, and Instagram could come up with its own ideas.

“Rivalry causes us to over-emphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past,” venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel wrote in his 2014 book Zero to One, which Systrom asked all his managers to read. “Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.”

The news that Weil was leaving Twitter to become Instagram’s head of product broke during an executive off-site at the end of January, where Twitter was planning its goals for the year. Dorsey was blindsided and visibly upset. While he’d known Weil was leaving, he’d been under the impression it was to take a break, not go to a major competitor. Weil was escorted off the premises, and then Dorsey wrote an angry email to Twitter’s entire staff about his disloyalty.

“We’re media companies, in the same line of work,” Sandberg explained. “Imagine if you worked for ABC or CBS, and then got recruited by NBC. Would it be unethical to go there?”

Snapchat’s best asset and biggest problem was Evan Spiegel himself. Success had gone to his head, and now he was building a company based primarily on his personal taste, not according to any sort of systematic decision-making. His employees saw him as stubborn, narcissistic, spoiled, and impulsive. Spiegel hated product testing, product managers, and optimizing for the data—basically everything that had made Facebook successful.

There’s no way Spiegel would go for that, Khan thought, but they did need the money. They were severely unprofitable after spending so much on data storage with Google. “How about a strategic investment?” he asked. “We don’t do that,” Rose said. “We buy, or we compete.”

Gizmodo also reported that employees were openly asking Facebook management whether they had a responsibility to prevent a Trump presidency. The reporter implied it was scary that Facebook’s employees realized their company was powerful enough to do this, if it wanted to.

In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences.

Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests.

The first problem was about how Facebook fit into its users’ days. While people spent an average of about 45 minutes per day on Facebook, known internally as the “big blue app,” they were doing so in short sessions—an average of less than 90 seconds per sitting, according to an internal data analysis. They were not lounging with Facebook on their couches so much as they were checking it at bus stops, in line for coffee, and on toilet seats.

As The Verge wrote at the time, “borrowing Snapchat’s ideas is working out okay for Instagram, but for some reason Facebook’s direct attempts always feel a little off—and desperate.” Zuckerberg didn’t see the matter in terms of “feel.” He saw it in terms of Instagram stealing Facebook’s opportunity.

For example, after Zuckerberg bought Oculus in 2014, he wanted to change the name of their virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, to the Facebook Rift. Brendan Iribe, a cofounder of Oculus and then CEO of that division, argued that it was a bad idea because Facebook had lost trust with game developers. Over a series of uncomfortable meetings, they settled on “Oculus Rift from Facebook.” In December 2016, after a number of similar disagreements, Zuckerberg pushed Iribe out of his CEO position.

The biggest threat to that brand, which Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus had raised in years past, was the fact that on an anonymous network, it’s easier for people to say hateful things about one another. Finally, Systrom decided, it was time to take on bullying.

The pop star, who knew Systrom through close friends, the investor Joshua Kushner and his supermodel girlfriend Karlie Kloss, started having a major problem that summer before the election. The comments on her photos were being bombarded with snake emoji, and the hashtag #taylorswiftisasnake.

She was in two public disputes with other celebrities. After she split with her boyfriend, producer and DJ Calvin Harris, Swift revealed that she’d helped write his hit song with Rihanna, “This Is What You Came For.” The revelation dominated the coverage of the song. He didn’t appreciate Swift making him look bad post-breakup, saying it had been her decision to use a pseudonym in the credits. Fans of Rihanna and Harris started calling her a snake—a sneaky person. In a separate incident around the same time, she criticized Kanye West for the lyrics about her in his song “Famous,” debuted that February 2016: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous.” Kim Kardashian West retaliated in a July episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where she shared a video of a conversation between Swift and her husband on Snapchat. In the video she gave approval for the “might have sex” part of the lyrics (though the “made that bitch famous” part remained up for debate).

Swift’s team had a close relationship with Instagram’s. Once, Charles Porch, the head of partnerships, had given them a heads-up about a hack of her account before they realized it. So they asked if there was anything Instagram could do about the snakes. Systrom wanted to automatically delete all the reptilian vandalism en masse. But people would notice. Jackson Colaço made the point that they couldn’t make a tool just for a famous person, without making it available to everyone else.

When Instagram finally talked about the tool’s origin story months later, they framed Swift as a “beta tester” helping the company out. They protected the fact that she’d been bothered by the onslaught.

Critics were still saying Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union were the result of a Facebook-fueled polarization of society. One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research, in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault.

Because Zuckerberg’s tour wasn’t helping the numbers, Facebook’s communications team gathered for an off-site meeting that spring of 2017, where Caryn Marooney, the PR head, presented research showing Facebook’s brand had a more unfavorable rating than that of Uber—a ride-sharing startup beset with scandal during that period.

When Facebook’s chief counsel, Colin Stretch, testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1, 2017, alongside lawyers from Google and Twitter, he revealed the most troubling statistics yet about Russia’s influence on the election. More than 80,000 posts from Russian accounts had been posted to Facebook, some boosted by advertising, stirring up controversy in the U.S. about immigration, gun control, gay rights, and race relations. Russia’s goal had been to infiltrate interest groups in the United States, and then make them angry. In the process, Stretch said, the posts had gone viral, reaching 126 million Americans. Later

So the true reach of Russia’s campaign on Facebook-owned properties was more like 150 million. Instagram got to be an afterthought in the conversation.

With Instagram’s biggest problems in Facebook’s hands, he had the luxury of avoiding blame. Instagram’s advertising, including all the ads from Russia, was run through Facebook’s self-service system. Facebook’s operations team was in charge of scanning all the rule-breaking content, including on Instagram. Jackson Colaço and a couple others stepped in to help Facebook with its investigation whenever Facebook asked. But mostly, for the Instagram employees, ignorance was bliss.

The Instagram Stories product, for example, was disproportionately popular in Spain after it launched. Employees in analytics found out the reason why only after asking their European colleagues on the community team. It turned out that younger people were using the tool to play an alluring game, which started when someone would direct-message their friend a number. That friend would then use that number to say a secret thought about the messenger publicly (“#12 es muy lindo!”) in their disappearing stories.

But in Zuckerberg’s opinion, Facebook Inc. was threatened if Facebook itself wasn’t thriving. Facebook was in a tough spot of its own making, dealing with more public scrutiny and skepticism than it had ever received. He had given so much freedom and support to Instagram. Now it was time for Instagram to start giving back.

But Facebook was Zuckerberg’s invention. And in this case, the CEO was reading the data with an emotional bias. His first decree, at the end of 2017, was a small one, barely noticeable to users. He asked Systrom to build a prominent link within the Instagram app to send his users to Facebook. And alongside the Facebook news feed, in the navigation to all of the social network’s other properties, like groups and events, Zuckerberg removed the link to Instagram.

The new feed order—which prioritized users’ closest relationships instead of the newest posts—meant influencers and businesses could no longer grow their followings by simply posting often.

Almost a year after the algorithm change, in May 2017, Kim Kardashian West would become the world’s fifth person to pass 100 million Instagram followers, after Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, and the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. The Kardashian family wasn’t influential enough to make Instagram undo the algorithm change, but they were successful with a different request.

Porch’s team liaised with Instagram’s engineers and came up with a solution: algorithmic ordering for comments too. Starting in the spring of 2017, comments on anyone’s photos from people who were important to them—maybe they were closer friends, or had a blue checkmark by their account saying they were “verified” as a public figure—appeared positioned higher and more prominently in the display.

So once again, as with Taylor Swift’s bullying complaint, Instagram changed the product for everyone based on the feedback of a few, standing firm on their overall assessment that the algorithm helped regular users see what they most wanted to see. They’d patched one problem, but now that hundreds of millions of users and businesses depended on the app, this change had a ripple effect in ways that Instagram hadn’t predicted.