Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

Adam Mosseri has warned that users who switch off Instagram’s recommendation system end up with a worse experience, telling an Australian press briefing that engagement can fall by as much as 50% and that satisfaction scores fall off a cliff.

Mosseri spoke on Thursday as Australia consults on legislation that would force platforms to prompt users to turn ranking off, the ABC reported.

“If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers,” he said.

Users miss more content and spend less time on the platform.

Read the objection carefully, because it is not what it sounds like. Mosseri is not arguing that a chronological feed harms users. He is arguing that it produces less engagement and less time on the platform.

Australia’s draft Digital Duty of Care bill exists because legislators believe engagement and time on platform are the harm. The measurement he offers as a warning is the outcome the bill is trying to produce.

The brands and publishers’ point is the stronger half, and it deserves engaging with. A feed ordered purely by time does fill with whoever posts most, which is generally not your friends.

That is a real design problem, and it is also a problem Instagram created: the reason professional accounts post at volume is that the ranked feed rewarded them for it. Removing the ranking does not remove the behaviour it trained.

It is worth setting the warning against Meta’s own recent messaging. The company has said its AI is making people spend more time on Instagram, presented as a success.

Mosseri now presents less time as a harm to users. Both statements can be true only if time on Instagram is good for the people spending it, which is the exact proposition the Australian bill declines to accept and which a jury in the Meta social media trial is currently being asked to weigh.

There is also an inconsistency inside Instagram’s own product plans. Mosseri has said he wants algorithm customisation to become a core part of the app rather than a buried setting.

Australia proposes to require a prompt offering exactly that kind of control. The disagreement is not about whether users should be able to shape their feed. It is about who initiates the conversation, and how easy the off switch is to find.

Instagram has been here before. It brought back chronological feeds in 2022 after political pressure in the United States, as an option users had to select each time rather than a persistent setting.

The lesson of that period is the one the Australian bill is built on: a right nobody surfaces is not a right anyone exercises, which is why the draft requires prompting rather than mere availability.

One number is missing, and it is the one that would settle the argument. Mosseri gave engagement, time spent, and satisfaction.

He did not say what happens to wellbeing measures, to reported regret, or to how people feel afterwards, which are the metrics Meta has been asked about repeatedly and which its own internal research has covered. A 50% engagement drop tells you the product changes.

It does not tell you whether the person is worse off, and that is the only question the legislation is asking.

On whether Instagram is addictive, Mosseri said it was controversial to say so and distinguished between colloquial and clinical usage. That is a defensible distinction, and it is also the answer of a company facing litigation in which the word carries a specific legal weight.

Europe should watch the numbers rather than the argument. Article 38 of the Digital Services Act has required very large platforms to offer a non-profiling feed option since 2023, and adoption has been modest, which the industry has read as proof that people do not want one.

Mosseri has now put a figure on what happens when they do choose it. If a 50% engagement drop is what an opted-out user looks like, the modest European adoption figures start to look less like disinterest and more like a measure of how well the option is hidden.