No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

That team paid special attention to the Kardashian-Jenner family, as they were now keepers of five of the top 25 Instagram accounts. 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.

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.

Everyone with a blue checkmark, after realizing that their comments would be prominently displayed, had an incentive to comment more. The comment ranking helped brands, influencers, and Hollywood types fight their deprioritization by the main algorithm. Instagram commenting became marketing, or, in the vernacular of Silicon Valley engineers, “growth hacking.”

Accounts with blue verified checkmarks, still difficult to obtain in countries where there were fewer Instagram employees coordinating, became more vulnerable to takeovers by hackers. The hackers would figure out a way to break through the login and then sell the accounts on the black market, where they were becoming ever-more valuable, in part because the checkmarks made them more visible in Instagram comments.

When their users chose to read hyper-partisan news, chose to share conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism, chose to share racist tirades or the manifestos of mass shooters, what was the company’s responsibility, if any, to curtail them?

Representatives of each explained that they wanted to err on the side of promoting free expression and limiting takedowns, embracing the solution that happened to be cheapest, necessitating the least human oversight.

especially through accounts like @commentsbycelebs. But the change, and its corresponding effect on user behavior, illustrated something fundamental, ignored in the arguments over content policy. Social media isn’t just a reflection of human nature. It’s a force that defines human nature, through incentives baked into the way products are designed.

As was apparent in the election, rewarding content that sparked users’ emotions helped give rise to an entire industry of fake-news sites.

Facebook is for getting likes, YouTube is for getting views, Twitter is for getting retweets, Instagram is for getting followers.

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.

around 2017, the public started to understand that the social media properties they loved weren’t just built for them, but were being used to manipulate their behavior too. Spurred by public and media outcry, all of these products faced reckonings for what they’d wrought on society. Except Instagram, which largely evaded criticism. Instagram was the newest, founded four to six years later than the others, so users were still catching up to such effects, which weren’t as immediately offensive and visible during the user experience on Instagram as on the other sites. Instagram, through its community and partnerships teams curating and promoting the work of its most interesting users, had done a good job of generating goodwill for its product.

“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.

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.”

seemingly taking the FTC seriously. But then Instagram didn’t enforce the policy, because after it’d made a tool that would allow users to comply, Instagram transferred any liability it might have had to the influencers and advertisers themselves.

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. Thanks to Instagram, life had become worth marketing—not for every Instagram user, but for millions of them.

Influencers were thinking of Instagram not as social media, but as publishing. “Content is a full-time job, all the time,” said Lauryn Evarts Bosstick, who runs @theskinnyconfidential, an Instagram account tied to a blog, podcast, and book to share motivational messages and tips for living life well. Her account has a cohesive aesthetic: busty selfies,

“It comes down to, how bad do you want it? You’re running a full online magazine every day by yourself and you’re the creative director, editor, writer, marketer, and putting it out there, hoping people like it, and then doing it all over again.”

influencers. 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.

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.

Demyttenaere and Hocke were previously business strategy consultants in London, she for Arthur D. Little and he for McKinsey. While documenting their extended honeymoon, they attracted thousands of followers, and then realized perhaps they could extend their trip indefinitely, using their business instincts to grow it.

The market for travel reached $8.27 trillion in 2017, up from $6 trillion in 2006, due in part to “increased awareness among youth about travel destinations with growth in social networks,” according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

People think we live the life of our dreams, which is true, but you’re always thinking, ‘Where can I find good content, good content, good content?’ ” They create entertainment and escapism, like reality television with a message of bliss instead of drama, that their followers continue to like and reward.

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.”

In 2018, the number of plane passengers reached a record 4.5 billion, on about 45 million flights worldwide.

As people curated their lives for their Instagram feeds, they also invested in enhancing their pictures, downloading apps like Facetune and Adobe Lightroom to adjust the whiteness of their teeth, the shape of their jaws, and the appearance of their waistlines. Facetune was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017, selling more than 10 million copies generally priced at $4.99.

The worldwide market for Botox injections to reduce the visibility of wrinkles is expected to double in size in a little over five years, reaching $7.8 billion in 2023, up from $3.8 billion in 2017. The market for synthetic skin fillers, to plump up areas with wrinkles, adjust the jawline or make lips fuller, is undergoing a similar expansion, even among teens.

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.

Instagram’s product always seemed to endorse an enhanced reality.

“Join this Instagram pod and beat the algorithm! Share your best post here!” a group on Reddit advertised in 2019.

the company told its followers. In 2018, this Instagram-first company passed $100 million in annual revenue and acquired 1 million new customers, all through direct sales. That year, Glossier sold one Boy Brow every two seconds. Their few retail locations are designed to offer experiences and function as marketing venues more than as sales outlets. In the Los Angeles location, there is a mirror with the words “You Look Good” inscribed so it will show up in a photo; everything is painted millennial pink; all makeup can be tried on on the spot; and the lighting is specifically designed for phone photography.

All of this perfection and commercial work masquerading as regular content has a price: a feeling of inadequacy for users who don’t understand the mechanics behind the scenes.

On Instagram, users are so accustomed to enhanced images that the culture of disclosure works the opposite way, with people tagging photos #nofilter when it’s real.

others. Instagram’s new comment filter would take all the worst comments and just make them not exist. Few users would notice the new default setting on their apps. It would just make Instagram seem more pleasant than it actually was.

That month, research groups commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee would report that 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.

Every Facebook team had to do this, but not every team at Facebook was running a mini company within the overall company, with its own revenue and product that didn’t depend on the Facebook news feed.

Now that he knew every Instagram success might result in a blow to the longevity of the main social network, it was more important to him than ever to coordinate between the teams. Facebook and its employees—and Zuckerberg himself—would have to be more directly involved in whatever Instagram did next, removing some need for hires.

So at Instagram, one of the fastest-growing parts of the business, on track to produce almost 30 percent of Facebook’s revenue by 2019, resentment and frustration started to brew.

The new hierarchy, the biggest reshuffling at the top of Facebook in corporate history, would formalize the new way Zuckerberg thought about his acquired properties Instagram and WhatsApp. Those two apps would be bundled with Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself, as part of a “family of apps,” all reporting up to Chris Cox, who was Zuckerberg’s most trusted product executive.

If it all worked smoothly, Zuckerberg would be able to create the ultimate social network. Facebook would be as big and powerful as the “family” was.

“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.”

On Friday, March 17, 2018, the New York Times and the Observer simultaneously broke the news that years earlier, Facebook had allowed the developer of a personality quiz app to obtain data on tens of millions of users, which that developer then shared with a firm called Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica retained the data and used it to help build its political consultancy.

Donald Trump’s campaign was a client. The story hit all of Facebook’s weak spots: shoddy data practices. Negligence. Lack of transparency with users. And a role in Trump’s win. It stoked distrust among politicians the world over.

Legislators were waking up to the fact that one company, in charge of entertaining and informing more than 2 billion people, was more influential in many ways than the government itself. Things that Facebook had done for years suddenly looked scandalous under this lens.

Facebook’s core news feed product, where news and information could so specifically be targeted to users’ interests, also seemed to have a tremendous downside. You couldn’t know what someone else saw when logged onto Facebook, what shaped their reality. Some

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.

The company embarked on an audit of everything in production, attempting to see if there were unexpected flaws that if unchecked could result in scandal. As part of the response, Facebook committed to building out its “integrity” team to be almost the size of Instagram, charged with handling all the content and privacy problems in the Facebook “family.”

Everything related to the debate about how much Facebook was helping Instagram, or how much Instagram should help Facebook, was sensitive.

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.

Theoretically, it could make Facebook more difficult for the government to break up into pieces, should an antitrust challenge arise, though that wasn’t Zuckerberg’s stated strategy.