We’re all tired of hearing this. We’ve heard it from everyone, self-righteous productivity heroes included. Still, here, I am going to say it again —not because I enjoy sounding like them, but because I believe Instagram has become worse for us than what it’s worth.
When we download Instagram, we are making a deal with them:Instagram gains from us and we gain from Instagram. This exchange is unequal — one we should not make.
When I think about what Instagram gets from us, I immediately think “money” —the normal payment for a service. However, our relationship with Instagram is anything but normal.
Yale Professor Edward Tufte aptly described how Instagram defines our relationship with them: “There are only two industries that call customers ‘users’ – illegal drugs and software.”
Instagram is a business model. Meta thought it was worth $1 billion in 2012. Any good business model is profitable, but an app is free, and they don’t make money off our posts. On the surface, Instagram lets us connect with our friends and asks for nothing in return.
But, the reality is far different from its altruistic surface. Instagram is not a human connection app —it is a data collection app. Their goal is to “optimize for engagement” —to keep a user occupied for long enough to collect sufficient data to build a profile on them, to the point they can predict user behavior. Then, they sell that power to advertisers — the chance to know exactly what someone will do and when they will do it.
We are not Instagram’s customers. Instagram’s customers are advertisers. Instagram is not selling to us, they are selling us. We are the products on their shelves. Every feature on the app furthers this process. The autoplay, the infinite scrolling, the state of the art algorithm — it’s all to keep us on the app, turn our behavior into a product and sell it.
Once we know what Instagram gets from us, we must decide if what we get in return makes for a fair exchange. I believe our side of the deal has been getting worse — these days, we sign up to be Instagram’s product for nothing in return.
In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself told us our deal has worsened at Meta’s Q1 2024 earnings call:
“Right now, about 30% of the posts on Facebook feed are delivered by our AI recommendation system. That’s up 2x over the last couple of years,” he said in his opening statement, adding, “And for the first time ever, more than 50% of the content people see on Instagram is now AI recommended.”
Not only is Instagram getting more from us than we anticipated, but when we are on the app, we can’t stay connected with our friends without a barrage of algorithmic slop from unknown people frying our brains. Instagram is not about our social circle anymore, it’s about what the algorithm knows will hold your attention best.
Gen Z averages a couple of hours a day on Instagram — an eighth of our waking hours. Extrapolate that to a four-year college career, and we’ve spent a semester trapped in an AI-powered machine that shows more dopaminergic rubbish and less of our friends.
Perhaps the strongest pressure to use Instagram is that over two-thirds of Gen Z uses it every day. But if we can all look at this deal for the parasitic relationship it is, it becomes clear that it is not worth taking. We can get a semester back, stop allowing ourselves to be a product and connect with our friends with less AI-recommended background noise than the algorithm would ever allow.