Instagram head Adam Mosseri on the 'paradigm shift' from posting in public to sharing in private

Business Insider

21-05-2025

Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago.
Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer.
So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mosseri felt about the company's recent pivot to Trump-friendly policies, and how he looked at TikTok, and a million other things. I didn't have enough time to get to everything, but I got to a lot of it, and you can hear our whole conversation on my Channels podcast.
In the edited excerpt below, Mosseri and I go over some big-picture stuff that tells you a lot about the current state of social media: Like why Instagram, Facebook and every other social media platform rely on algorithms to show you stuff they thinks you like, instead of relying on users to program their own experience. And why the company is gung-ho on getting users to privately send each other photos and videos, instead of its initial focus — getting them to post stuff on a public feed.
And I also wanted to know about the backstory behind Threads — the text-based social network it launched just as Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. Mosseri was happy to talk about all of it.
Peter Kafka: In the first few years of social media feeds, users would see a list of everything that everyone they were following had posted, in chronological order. Now, the standard at every app is a curated, algorithmic feed. Why does everyone who runs a social media product think that's better?
Adam Mosseri: It's because it's the only way to grow these experiences.
The amount of content people post publicly in feeds is going down across the entire industry, because people are moving more and more sharing to stories — which you could argue is a different kind of feed — but even more into messaging, group chats, one-on-one chats.
On Instagram, there are way more photos and videos shared into DMs than into stories, and way more photos and videos are shared into stories than into the feed. So if the amount of content you have to rank is decreasing — how engaging the feed is is also just decreasing. It's just getting worse.
We show recommendations because you might follow 200 accounts and one in 10 of them posted. So we've [only] got 20 things [to show you]. And we can reorder those 20 things 20 factorial ways, but that's only so much upside.
Whereas if we look at the billion things posted in a given day and we find something you're interested in, there's more upside.
Instagram has been encouraging messaging. It's something you've been talking about for a while. It's something users were doing on their own, and now you guys are responding to it?
Oh yeah. It's a paradigm shift.
The thing you hear is that people are going to chats because they feel like that's safer or they can have more candor. But are regular people literally thinking about how their posts are gonna be received? Is there some other reason people are sharing more privately versus publicly?
The foundational reason is that there are more things that you would feel comfortable saying to somebody one-on-one than things you would feel comfortable sharing publicly.
This is a weirdly sad example, but you could think of sharing in-feed as standing on top of your roof, yelling something at a hundred people, and hoping that 20 people hear it. There's some things I would do that for. But the average thing — the amount of things I would say to you on a phone call, my wife on a phone call, my best friend on a phone call — there's a lot more of those things. I think that's the most important reason.
How does that shift affect the business of Meta?
It moves more and more of that friend content into private experiences. And then the question is, can you either make those private sharing experiences symbiotic with the ones that we monetize — like feed and stories? Or can you monetize those experiences directly?
For Instagram, the thing that has been amazing is that we have leaned into video in a way that actually grows messaging. When I worked on the Facebook app, we leaned a lot into video in 2014, 15, 16. We were very focused on trying to catch up with YouTube, and growing video grew the amount of time spent in the Facebook app — but it decreased everything else. It decreased messages, comments, likes, and revenue — because there's less ads per minute.
[But] with Reels on Instagram, because they're short and because they're entertaining… I'll see a standup comic doing a bit that I love and I'll send it to my brother, because I know he's going to enjoy it.
Or I'll see a piece on politics and I'll send it to you. Because I think you might be interested in it. And then you and I talk, maybe you look at your feed, maybe you engage with something else. Maybe you send that to somebody else.
So there is a private messaging part of the experience, [but] we've managed to build it in a way that's very symbiotic with the public context — like feed and stories and reels, which we monetize directly with ads.
We're going to show you engaging stuff, you're going engage in it, and we'll be able to monetize your eyeballs like we always have — and then you'll share it with other people.
It's a positive feedback loop. And it's important particularly for Instagram because we are about connecting with your friends over creative things. I mean, for some people, we might be a pure entertainment-based or public content-based app. But we want friend content to continue to be a core part of the experience for most users.
And this allows Instagram to stay social, but still grow as a business.
I wanted to ask you about the Threads origin story. I didn't realize that it was originally supposed to be a feature within Instagram.
We were talking about different ways to compete more directly with Twitter…
Why? I know that back around 2010, the two services were fiercely competitive. And then basically that competition stopped, because you guys just lapped Twitter over and over and you won. There were many more people who wanted to engage in a Facebook and Instagram-like experience than they did on Twitter.
So why bother going back to Twitter?
I think Twitter's a great app in a lot of ways. I use Twitter a lot, still. I think it's better for public conversations.
Even though it's not the biggest app, there's a lot of cultural relevance. There's a lot of really vibrant, amazing communities there — NBA Twitter, black Twitter there. There's these insular networks like VC Twitter and crypto Twitter.
And part of what we care about at Instagram is being a place where creatives do their thing.
And the initial thought was to bolt it onto Instagram?
Around that time we really accelerated our work on broadcast channels on WhatsApp and on Instagram and on Messenger — which by the way, are a big deal in a lot of the rest of the world, particularly popularized by Telegram. We looked at and had a bunch of designs for building something like Threads as a tab into Instagram. And we did consider and ended up building a separate app, and there were a lot of contentious debates.
What did you want to do? Where did you want what's now called Threads to live?
I was excited about channels. But Mark [Zuckerberg] made the point — and I agreed with him — that channels are not going to be a place where you keep up with tons and tons of culturally relevant people. They're going to be a place where you subscribe to the five or 10 you care about most.
I was more bullish on building something within Instagram. Mark's point was that a separate app will be harder — but if it was successful, it would be a more valuable thing to create in the world.
A lot of what Mark does is anchor us really high. And no matter how strong a year we have, the question is always — how can we do better?
It was late. I was in Italy for my anniversary with my wife, and [Mark's] like, "Well, if you were gonna do something bigger, what would you do?"
So I was riffing and I kind of pitched a version of Threads: We'll lean on Instagram's strength with creators. We'll use Instagram identity. You can bootstrap it with [Instragram's social] graph, but we'll focus on basic replies and threads. I called it Textagram as a joke. Which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it.
And Mark's like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. We should do that." And I was like, "I don't think we should do that." And in the classic Mark move, he said, "OK. But if you don't do it, I'll have somebody else do it, and it'll be built on Instagram."
And I said, "OK. Sounds like I'm signed up." So he gets the credit.