Mosseri estimates this is the most Instagram has spent in a given year on creator incentives. Instagram sees creators as a good source of content after many rank-and-file users began posting fewer of their own updates.
That’s how Mosseri describes the state of things in late 2021, where a chart in a board presentation shows relatively flat growth in time spent on Instagram. If you were to look at Instagram’s growth here in isolation, he says, it would look like Instagram had some positive, modest growth. But comparing it to TikTok’s explosive rise tells a different story.
Two congressional Republicans are introducing a bill that would essentially ban pornography from the internet by rewriting the legal definition of obscenity — but it’s not the first time it’s been tried. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act at least twice before, once in 2022 and again in 2024, and it’s failed to advance so far. Donald Trump’s Project 2025 blueprint also promised to ban porn, but without a detailed roadmap.
In a March 2020 update to Instagram staff, Mosseri gave a bleak overview of the challenges the company was facing. “The engagement trends, particularly in the US, have been concerning. Time spent has dropped, stories consumption and production have plateaued, Feed’s decline has continued, and time in Explore has been sliding since the summer of 2018,” he wrote, blaming the slide, in part on some of the company’s own mistakes “and competition from TikTok and Snapchat.”
The first time around, Instagram tried to build its short-form video concept on top of Stories, which he says was “not a sound foundation” for the product. “I think we could have and should have been more aggressive,” he says about building Reels and competing with TikTok.
Mosseri says Meta is always focused on competition, but TikTok represented the greatest he’s seen during his time at the company. After seeing engagement plateau in 2019, however, the company has since bounced back thanks to building out Reels and better AI-powered recommendations. “We’ve seen a lot of growth for the overall app, though the percentage of the app spent on friend content has gone down,” Mosseri testifies.
Mosseri testifies that “growth is everything” to Instagram and the company was deeply concerned to see feed impressions declining and engagement on stories plateauing in 2019. “Competition from TikTok is a big concern,” a presentation from the time says, adding a “conservative estimate” that 40 percent of the decline in time spent on Instagram was due to TikTok, and 23 percent in the US in particular.
Mosseri says he used to think of those platforms as more “lean-back experiences,” but that’s changed in recent years. TikTok is now “every bit as participatory as we are at this point” and as YouTube has leaned into Shorts, it’s “brought them closer to us.” Mosseri notes that TikTok now has a friends tab, which a TikTok executive testified earlier in trial only accounts for about 1 percent of the videos viewed on the app.
In a January Reel, Mosseri announced a new feed within Instagram of videos their friends have liked in an effort to make sure Instagram is not just “a lean-back experience, but a participatory one, a social one.” It underscores how Instagram still sees connecting friends as a core experience on its app. Mosseri testifies he was distracted watching the video because “I’m mostly focusing on the one comment that said ‘definitely not a good idea.’”
In this 2024 video played in court, Mosseri explains that Instagram doesn’t plan to go after the long-form video market because it’s not as conducive to sharing and interacting with friends. Mosseri testifies that even today, “I still think friends are an important part of the experience.”
In an email thread from 2018, Mosseri checked in with Zuckerberg from paternity leave to try to communicate concerns the Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger had with strategy changes for the app. Mosseri wrote that after catching up with Systrom, it was “hard for me to get a read on what’s going on as the relationship is strained.” He told Zuckerberg, “The core tension seems to be twofold: (1) you believe slowing down Instagram will help more than some others do, and (2) your tolerance for handicapping Instagram is expectedly higher than the Instagram team’s.”
Zuckerberg told Mosseri in a 2018 email that even as Instagram grows to include more public entertainment posts, it “can never exclusively be for public figures or it will cease to be a social product.” Meta has been arguing that the social media market has changed so much that entertainment is a key focus of social apps including Instagram and TikTok, but the email suggests that at least at the time, Meta’s CEO felt that connecting with friends would always need to be remain a core use case.
The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel gets a shoutout in court when the government plays a clip of Mosseri’s January 2021 podcast interview. In the clip, Mosseri talks about joining Instagram and making changes to the safety and integrity operations. Mosseri says on the stand that he indeed “vaguely remember[s] talking to Nilay.” Here’s part of the transcript from the clip they played in court:
When I joined Instagram, I wasn’t running it. I was the head of product. I had come from running News Feed at Facebook for a number of years. And I told everybody I was going to be a sponge, and I wasn’t going to push for any change for a couple months while I ramped up and tried to better understand Instagram, the product, the employee base, and the values.
But the one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was on safety and integrity. I was pretty interested in the details, having spent the last couple of years being responsible for fake news on Facebook and a bunch of other gnarly safety problems.
I found for the most part that [Instagram was] just running our own stuff, and our team was tiny. And so I made the team pivot and essentially [integrate] the technology and work with the engineers who worked on safety across the rest of the company. I actually lost a bunch of people because of that. Not because they disagreed that it was a better way to keep people safe on Instagram over the long run, but it just wasn’t why they signed up to be on the team. So it was pretty painful for six months on that front. And I lost some credibility with some of the people.
But the team decided to make it a standalone app because they wanted to replicate how within Twitter, replies are as prominent as the original posts — something that’s not typically the case on Instagram. The group decided it would be too confusing to users to squeeze in this different model. “That was a very contentious decision internally,” Mosseri testifies.
