In the past two years, Carlton says the amount of time US users spend on “friend” content on Instagram has declined from 11 percent to 7 percent. As of January, US Instagram users spent 51 percent of their time on the app on Reels. When Instagram has experimented with reducing users’ access to Reels, he says, time spent on the app goes down. Those who had full access to the short-form videos overall spent less time on Feed and Stories, which the FTC has said is associated with friend content that doesn’t compete with TikTok and YouTube.