You don’t need to be a Silicon Valley tech whizz to know that getting on the wrong side of the Kardashian/Jenners is foolish. Four years ago when Kylie Jenner, the most followed woman on Instagram, told her 361 million followers that she no longer used Snapchat, more than $1 billion was wiped off the company’s value in a single day. So, when the 24-year-old queen of influencers voiced her disapproval at a recent unpopular Instagram redesign, Mark Zuckerberg, who owns parent company Meta, was quick to react. Jenner had added her powerful sway to a chorus of disgruntled social media users who were appealing to tech-chiefs to Make Instagram Instagram Again.
It came after the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced by video that the photo-sharing app would be experimenting with a few changes. “We’re going to continue to support photos, it’s part of our heritage,” the 39-year-old said. “But I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.” The update opens to full-screen photos and videos, the same way that arch-rival TikTok does, and shows users more algorithm-suggested content from accounts they don’t follow rather than posts from their family and friends. The backlash was immediate.
Before Zuckerberg could watch two TikToks, the ‘Make Instagram Instagram Again’ petition had been shared by reality star Jenner with the remark: “Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, everyone.” Her sister, Kim Kardashian (who has 327 million followers on the platform), later joined in, adding: “Pleaseeeeeee. Pretty Please.” Chrissy Teigen, who has 38.6 million followers, wrote: “I don’t see my actual friend’s posts and they don’t see mine.”
It did the trick: Mosseri announced they’d be rolling back the changes and that the redesign would be phased out within weeks. Industry experts can smell the fear and days after the U-turn it was announced that boss Mosseri and Sir Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, will be moving to London, working from Instagram’s King’s Cross office and hiring more developers to join the ranks of the UK Meta 4,000-strong workforce.
An insider said they’d known about the move for several months and elsewhere it was reported that part of the decision was Mosseri’s desire to move to London with wife, Monica. But to many it looks like a crisis move. Indeed, a leaked memo from Meta back in June suggested the company was worried about competition from other social media platforms and would be upping its use of algorithm-generated content. And last week Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, posted its first fall in revenues. One Meta insider told the Evening Standard that another reason for the move was to save money. “The cost of employing engineering staff in California is more expensive than anywhere else in the world. So Meta (and other large tech companies) are keen to build bigger engineering hubs in London and elsewhere.”
Moreover, because new EU regulations have come in which set a comprehensive standard for regulating the digital space it makes sense for Instagram to be in the heart of the action. “There’s a growing realisation that elements of the platform need to start approaching things from a more global perspective — hence Adam spending more time in London. European regulation increasingly drives what we do as a company, so more people in the UK means more understanding.”
However, sceptics speculate that the atmosphere is one of panic. In July, a concerned Zuckerberg told his staff that Meta was experiencing “one of the worst downturns in recent history”. He announced he’d be slashing hiring plans and that bosses would be encouraged to identify staff who weren’t pulling their weight. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.”
Experts say this scramble to compete with a younger, nimbler rival like TikTok is unsurprising. “This is something we’ve seen from Meta-owned apps and services in the past,” said Chris Stokel-Walker, tech journalist and author of TikTok Boom: China’s Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media. “An app will become hugely popular, then complacent, and get overtaken by the next big thing. Then the owners panic and try to replicate the competitor by borrowing bits of it. It then becomes this Frankenstein’s Monster app that no one really likes. They either have to abandon it or double down. The public outcry shows people don’t want a second-rate TikTok.”
Stokel-Walker thinks that there’s been a fundamental shift in the way we use social media in the past couple of years and that whether we like it or not, videos are here to stay. “We now live in a world where every app has a short-form vertical video content — Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat. Videos are more dynamic and have become easier to produce. Videos are vibrant, more engaging.” He has a theory that the pandemic was a factor in the change. “Most people’s feeds were glam photos on holiday, in nightclubs, at restaurants — all that stopped for the best part of 18 months. It created a paradigm shift.” It increased people’s appetite for entertainment on social media, especially for entertainment carefully tailored to them.
“TikTok stole my heart when it rapidly identified that I was a woman in my twenties who worked in social media, loved niche pop culture references, Asian cooking, bad Nineties films and post-punk,” said Olivia Wedderburn, head of social and influence at creative agency TMW Unlimited. “When I head to Instagram, it’s only got as far as a woman in her twenties. It shows me pregnancy videos, big fluffy white weddings, and tips for weaning which send me into a panic as I oscillate between offended and inadequate. It’s no wonder swathes are switching off.”
Now Instagram, which is 12 years old, is in the midst of an identity crisis, not knowing whether to revert back to a chronological, image-led timeline or push on with their mission to flood feeds with suggested video-content. Content creators are confused. Malvika Sheth, 23, who has 90,000 followers on Instagram and 13,000 on TikTok said: “I don’t know what Instagram wants me to prioritise in the long run — it’s always changing… so my current stance is to just do a mix of Reels (short videos) and photos. I’m glad they rolled out Reels, I just wish they made up their mind about which to prioritise.” And it’s just as bad for the audience. One person on Twitter complained: “The new Instagram update really understood what I was looking for: none of my friends’ content, reposted TikToks from meme accounts I do not follow, 100x more ads and everything played at full volume against my will.”
While TikTok has only half the user-base of Instagram, it’s grown at a much more rapid rate. From 2020 to 2021 it gained 400 million users whereas it took Instagram three years to double its user-base from one billion to two billion.
We were introduced to TikTok in 2016 by Chinese company ByteDance. It was a platform where you could watch shared short clips of anything you like — normally people doing pranks, dancing, singing and having fun. It caught people’s attention, especially the Gen Z demographic. Now not only does it have more downloads than Instagram and Facebook, but a recent survey also found TikTok trumps the BBC as a primary source of news videos for teenagers.
As for Instagram, Stokel-Walker thinks tech-chiefs will follow the data. “Mosseri basically said we hear you but we know better. He still thinks the future is video. We may get loud and shouty and ask for the old Instagram back but the engagement data shows we prefer videos. Insta will delay its changes for a bit but will ultimately continue.”
Ellen Judson, who runs the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, agrees. “Ultimately, these are private companies: they aren’t public service providers. So they are going to respond to global market trends, rather than the experiences, needs, or interests of citizens. And so the dominant force shaping people’s online lives will continue to be — how can platforms make the most money?”
A Meta spokesman told the Evening Standard: “Based on our findings and community feedback, we’re pausing the full-screen test on Instagram so we can explore other options, and we’re temporarily decreasing the number of recommendations you see in your feed so we can improve the quality of your experience.
“We recognize that changes to the app can be an adjustment and while we believe that Instagram needs to evolve as the world changes, we want to take the time to make sure we get this right.”
