No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

A couple months after the comments algorithm changed, the singer Rihanna commented on a makeup company’s post, criticizing their lack of foundation shades for black women. She made news for calling out racism, and her own makeup brand, Fenty Beauty, benefited. The celebrity “clapback” in Instagram comments became such a common tactic that entertainment websites started ranking and listing the most memorable ones.

An Instagram user’s path to success was obvious, based on benchmarking against others. All you had to do was create the right kind of content: visually stimulating, with a reflective but optimistic caption, inspiring some level of admiration. En masse, those activities spilled over into real life and real business decisions. The version of Instagram that the founders had set out to create, one that would foster art and creativity and provide visual windows into the lives of others, was slowly being warped by the metrics Instagram prioritized, turning the app into a game that one could win.

The effect had already played out in other parts of the internet, where user-generated content reigns. On YouTube, the site’s algorithm gradually started to reward creators according to watch time, thinking that a longer time spent on a video meant it was engaging enough to be displayed higher in searches and recommendations. In response, those seeking fame on the site stopped making short skits and started making 15-minute makeup tutorial videos and hour-long debates about video game characters, so they could be displayed in rankings more prominently and slot in more ads. YouTube also measured average percentage of a video viewed, as well as average watch duration, as signals for ranking.

The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve. Now that the products are adopted by a critical mass of the world’s internet-connected population, it becomes easier to describe them not by what they say they are, but by what they measure: Facebook is for getting likes, YouTube is for getting views, Twitter is for getting retweets, Instagram is for getting followers.

When someone goes to Google, their inbox, or their text messages, they generally know what they want to accomplish. But on social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.

But Instagram was not without problems. Its most prolific users were doing whatever they needed to do to build their brands and businesses on the site—warping reality in the process.

That was a problem, the FTC said. The regulator made an example of Lord & Taylor in 2016, with a settlement saying it needed to stop its unfair and deceptive advertising practices. “Consumers have the right to know when they’re looking at paid advertising,” explained Jessica Rich, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In March 2017, regulators sent a polite request to 90 different brands, celebrities, and influencers. The letter was intended to be a warning. Influencers now needed to let the public know when they were being paid to post something and include a disclosure at the top of the caption, not hidden in a pile of hashtags or after a long description, or else face fines. The sponsorship had to be clear and unmistakable, not something like #thankyouAdidas, or a hashtag like #sp, which some influencers were using as shorthand for “sponsored.”

The FTC’s warnings mattered little. The company’s rules mattered even less. The product’s built-in incentives—likes, comments, followers—ruled all. Sponsorship deals or not, everyone on Instagram was selling in some way. They were selling an aspirational version of themselves, turning themselves into brands, benchmarking their metrics against those of their peers.

To figure out what influencers to hire, brands would look at their engagement rates—calculated by adding likes and comments on a post, then dividing by the number of followers, using third-party services like Captiv8 and Dovetale—trying to determine whose reach was real, and whose percentage was too low to be worth the money. Like any system, it can be gamed. And Instagram ended up fueling a problem not just about truth in advertising, but about truth in life.

Behind the festival was marketer slash con man Billy McFarland, a mastermind of hype, who got the rapper Ja Rule to be a cofounder and the digital marketing group FuckJerry to promote it. McFarland understood the power of influencer marketing, paying Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single Instagram post to drive ticket sales. He preyed directly on the lifestyle Instagram influencers valued. There would be exclusivity; people would get to fly in on a custom VIP Boeing 737. Guests would stay in eco-friendly luxury domes. They would be asked to preload money onto wristbands, to have a completely cashless experience. The problem was, McFarland knew more about hype than about event planning, and ended up not having anything to show for his promises.

The cash wristbands turned out to have been a means for McFarland to get some last-minute liquidity when his project was running low on money. The most iconic image posted from the event was not of sun-kissed models or white sands, but of a sad sandwich, in a clamshell takeout box. Two slices of bread, two slices of cheese, and a side salad with dressing. It went immediately viral—on Twitter. After an FBI investigation and a class-action lawsuit, McFarland was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison and forced to pay $26 million in restitution.

Every day, Camille Demyttenaere and her husband, Jean Hocke, choreograph experiences entirely for the purpose of posting them on Instagram.

Several of them cited a study that logged 259 deaths during attempted selfies between 2011 and 2017, mostly by people in their early twenties taking unnecessary risks.

And it’s paid off. Their clothes and sunscreen are free, as long as they mention the brands who provide it in a post. Also free are their hotels, transportation, and meals—often sponsored by a tourism board or travel agency. Brands pay travel influencers a per-post rate of about $1,000 per 100,000 followers, they said. But they make the most money off their Lightroom preset filters. Before the train incident, they were making upward of $300,000 per month just selling those via a link in their Instagram bio, Hocke said. He expects revenue to rise with follower count.

The app’s users, inspired by seeing people they follow out doing interesting things, tend to want to do the same, spending their money on experiences over products. “The quest for likes requires a constant stream of new shareable content in the form of stories and pictures,” the consulting firm McKinsey wrote in a report. “Experiences play into this thirst for content because they are more likely to lead to such stories and pictures than the purchase of a new product would be. Even experiences that don’t turn out as expected—say, a long flight delay or rainy football game—eventually turn into shareable stories.”

“I don’t know what real skin looks like anymore,” the model and prolific internet commentator Chrissy Teigen tweeted in February 2018. “People of social media just know: IT’S FACETUNE, you’re beautiful, don’t compare yourself to people ok.”

Dr. Kevin Brenner, a plastic surgeon for high-end clients in Beverly Hills, has operated his private practice for 15 years, focusing on breast and nose surgeries and revisions. Dr. Brenner reports that his business has changed dramatically since the advent of Instagram. Prospective patients want to see before-and-after photos and videos of specific procedures, which he provides on his @kevinbrennermd account to 14,000 followers. Then they come in knowing exactly what they want to get done. Often, they’re willing to be filmed under the knife, so that he can continue to educate his audience.

The problem: what is portrayed on Instagram isn’t always feasible. He says that his competitors, the most prominent of whom have followings in the hundreds of thousands or millions, might Photoshop out a scar from a breast implant, though it’s impossible to perform the procedure without making an incision. Their patients may post a before-and-after photo, where the after photo is filtered and edited and the patient’s skin looks more tan and smooth than it was previously.

The most dangerous case of false expectations centers around the Brazilian butt lift. The BBL procedure was performed on more than 20,000 people in the U.S. in 2017 by board-certified surgeons, up from 8,500 in 2012, and, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, was the hottest growing plastic surgery procedure in 2018. Inspired by Kim Kardashian, a BBL involves a surgeon sucking out fat from one’s stomach or thighs and injecting it into their buttocks, for a body type that appeals on Instagram. The results can even be deadly if the fat cells get injected into the gluteal muscle. In 2017 a task force representing board-certified doctors found that 3 percent of surgeons performing the procedure had had a patient die.

the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), the troll farm that had run the campaign to divide America with memes and fake accounts, received more likes and comments on their Instagram content than on any other social network—including Facebook. While Facebook was a better venue for going viral, Instagram was a better place to spread lies. On Instagram, anyone could become famous among strangers. And so the Kremlin’s IRA did too. Nearly half of their accounts achieved more than 10,000 followers, and 12 of them had over 100,000. They used the accounts to sell things. One sold the idea that Hillary Clinton was a bad feminist. Another, @blackstagram_, with 303,663 followers before Facebook took it down in the Russian account purge, touted products from what it said were black-owned businesses, while telling black Americans not to waste their time voting.

Perhaps assigning blame to Facebook was appropriate. Facebook, after all, wanted the credit for Instagram’s success. But during the tussle for power in 2018, leaders at both social networks would fail to prioritize fixing Instagram’s downsides.

“Everything breaks at a billion.” —FORMER INSTAGRAM EXECUTIVE

“How much head count did Oculus get?” Systrom asked Brendan Iribe, the cofounder who was no longer CEO of the virtual reality division that Facebook had acquired for $2.2 billion in 2014 but was still working there. “More than 600,” Iribe said. Instagram was on track to deliver $10 billion in revenue in 2018, while Oculus was on track to lose millions.

Facebook pushed to put advertising in WhatsApp Status, their version of Stories. But in order to place those ads in front of the right people, WhatsApp would have to know more about the users of the chat app, which would mean chipping away at the encryption. The founders, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, stubbornly resisted the idea, which violated their motto—“No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—and which they thought would break users’ trust. Acton decided to leave Facebook: his decision cost him $850 million in stock options. (He was still a billionaire from the deal, many times over.)

“At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton underscored. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

“I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class,” David Marcus, the Facebook executive in charge of a new cryptocurrency initiative, later wrote publicly. “It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class.”

“Let’s be straight with each other,” Systrom told Cox, with Krieger in the room, once he was back from paternity leave. “I need independence. I need resources. And when something happens, I know I’m not always going to agree with it, but I need honesty. That’s what’s going to keep me here.” Cox said that he was committed to advocating for everyone under his leadership, including Systrom and the new leaders of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook, to have the creative freedom they needed to do a good job. That year, he decided that keeping Systrom and Krieger from leaving would be his top priority.

For one thing, they couldn’t agree on the main trait they hated about Facebook. They all had different agendas to pursue with Zuckerberg. And two, some of their critiques fell flat because they didn’t know nearly enough about how Facebook worked. For example, Senator Orrin Hatch asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” “Senator, we run ads.” Zuckerberg smirked. The line ended up on T-shirts. This was his disposition throughout. Zuckerberg had been trained by his lawyers to keep the testimony as dry as he possibly could.

Instagram had a separate set of community guidelines, more tuned to a visual network where people built personal businesses. It told users not to spam each other for commercial purposes, or steal each other’s content, or post unclothed pictures of their children.

The average Facebook employee made more than six figures, while a contractor in Phoenix might make $28,800 per year, and in Hyderabad, India, $1,401 a year. Some of them lasted mere days or months, because of the burden on their mental health from seeing the worst of humanity daily.

named Eileen Carey. Carey had been trying to get Instagram’s attention on the issue of opioid sales on its app ever since 2013, when she worked at a consultancy on behalf of Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin.

She finally reached Rosen in April 2018 via Twitter direct message, and told him to do a search for #oxys on Instagram. There were 43,000 results at the time. “Yikes,” Rosen responded. “This is SUPER helpful.” For years, Instagram simply hadn’t been proactively looking for drug sellers, or paying attention to the trend in Carey’s reports. With Rosen’s push, the company removed the hashtags one day before Zuckerberg testified. But removing an offending hashtag or two didn’t remove drug sales from Instagram. The general problem remained. So Rosen told Systrom his request for his own integrity staff made a lot of sense. Then Zuckerberg denied it. He said Instagram had to figure out its problems with its own resources.

They needed someone new on product. Kevin Weil, whom Systrom recruited in from Twitter in 2016, had left to join Facebook’s new cryptocurrency group, Libra, which would try to develop a global form of money to rival the U.S. dollar.

Instagram employees were skeptical of their choice and wondered if the Instagram cofounders had had a choice at all. Amid the tension with Facebook, nobody was sure if the founders really wanted Mosseri, or if they’d been forced to bring him in so that Instagram could be more tightly controlled by Facebook.

Mosseri didn’t know the other reason the Instagram founders had recruited him. Systrom and Krieger thought that if tensions with Zuckerberg mounted, or if they became tired of navigating politics with Facebook, they needed to train someone who they could trust, who could advocate for Instagram with Facebook. One day, Mosseri might need to lead the company they’d started.

A month later, Zuckerberg touted both the new IGTV product and the fact that Instagram had reached 1 billion users during Facebook’s earnings conference call with Wall Street investors.

He and Systrom had spoken extensively about using Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory of product development, which states that consumers “hire” a product to do a certain task, and that its builders should be thinking about that clear purpose when they build. Facebook was for text, news, and links, for example, and Instagram was for posting visual moments and following interests.

Instagram’s analysis showed that between 6 and 8 percent of all original content on Facebook was cross-posted from Instagram. Often, the attribution would be a cue for people to comment on the photo where it was originally posted.

At the end of 2019, Instagram announced that it would stop letting people see the like count on other users’ photos. Results from a months-long test of the change showed positive effects on behavior, though Instagram wouldn’t say exactly what the effects were.

The app also started telling users when they’d seen all the new posts in their feed, so they could stop scrolling. Both moves were praised by the media and celebrities. Instagram seemed to be standing up for the well-being of its community.

Just like Instagram’s users will have trouble letting go of likes, Facebook will have trouble changing the motivations of its workforce. Zuckerberg says he now wants to measure the social network’s progress in terms of meaningful conversations, and time well spent.

In late 2019, Zuckerberg made a cameo appearance at an Instagram-branded conference and took a selfie with the crowd. Internally at Facebook, he was talking about using Instagram to take on TikTok, the Chinese app that had replaced Snapchat as the top threat to Facebook’s dominance.

Systrom and Krieger weren’t at the party. Systrom hadn’t even been posting on his Instagram account. Actually, he’d been un-posting. The picture taken on the couch in his home with Krieger and Adam Mosseri, to signal a friendly transfer of power, no longer appeared on his feed.

Mosseri was determined to prove to employees that he would maintain the same push-and-pull with Facebook that had helped Systrom and Krieger come to better conclusions about what to build, not just by doing what seemed obvious to Zuckerberg.

There are also the regulatory questions. Governments are waking up to the idea that the top alternative to Facebook is an app also owned by Facebook. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are both probing whether Facebook is a monopoly, and revisiting the Instagram acquisition as part of their investigation.

Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.” But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior.

When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce the spread of hate speech on the platforms, we benefit massively from working together closely,” Mosseri said.

But in practice, Instagram-specific problems get attention only after Facebook’s headline issues are addressed first. Employees explain that at Facebook, it simply seems logical. Every decision is about impacting the most people possible, and Facebook has more users than Instagram does.

Instagram doesn’t know the full scale of its problems because it hasn’t invested in proactive detection. Instagram will take down a rash of photos of illegal activity, or a network of folks buying and selling verification, and then the problems will resurface in a different way. They’ll ban young people from seeing plastic surgery filters, but then not have a proper age verification system. It’s like a beautifully decorated apartment complex, full of pests and leaks. It requires a patch-up here, a trap there, and an occasional deep clean for it to be hospitable to tenants. But the managers of the building don’t have the resources to think about where the leaks are starting, or whether there’s a structural problem, because their contractors have to remodel the much bigger Facebook building first.