Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why is Instagram Reels so unhinged?

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

You can spend hours carefully curating your algorithms on TikTok and YouTube, But there’s one place where the algorithm doesn’t seem to care about what you want to see: Instagram Reels. Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos joins Taylor to dive deep into the strangest corners of IG Reels and unpack how the platform became such an unusual place online. Then, Taylor weighs in on the latest news, including Taylor Swift's stance on AI, right wing YouTubers getting paid millions by a Russian propaganda group, why Facebook keeps removing emergency fire alerts, and the new iPhone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Taylor Swift warns about AI. Right-wing influencers are getting paid big money to smear Kamala Harris. Apple unveils new iPhone and our main topic. Why is Instagram Reels so weird? I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up right now on Power User. I think that a social media algorithm would figure out the things that you like and focus on serving you as much of that content as possible. That's how TikTok and YouTube work anyway.

But there's one place I've noticed where the conventional rules of social media don't seem to apply, where the weirdest stuff from the most random people will pop into your feed with no rhyme or reason. Friday crazy. More sing. Cuss words, guys. Mystery is intriguing. That place is Instagram Reels.

What sets Instagram Reels, apart from its competitors, is its completely unhinged algorithm that seems to go out of its way to promote cursed content. At least that's my experience and the experience of my guests today. today, Katie Natopoulos. Katie is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, and maybe together we can get to the bottom of why Meta, the biggest social media company in the world, made something like this. Katie, welcome to Power User. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so Instagram Reels launched about four years ago. It was sensibly launched to compete with TikTok, YouTube shorts, this boom in short form video that we saw. But since then, it's kind of emerged as this unique, weird, distinct place on the internet. So I wanted to talk to you about that today. To start things off, what is your current experience of Instagram Reels like? So I love Instagram Reels. I am like the number one Instagram Reels fan. Literally I've never heard this sentence before my life. I swear, I love it more than TikTok, which I thought was never possible when it first launch. When it first launch, I thought it was so

stupid and now it's got for me at least and obviously like everyone's experience is very different but I can tell that other people are seeing some of the same stuff that I'm seeing. It's got an immense amount of weirdos and and I guess I should qualify that with like people who are actually weird but also a lot of people who it seems like they aren't trying to post professionally like normies but I like like love that. And then mixed into that, there are people who are sort of trying to do it professionally, but they're weird. I feel like I've seen so much conversation about this online. I mean, I run a couple of meme pages, and this is like a frequent topic of discussion among people that I

would say use Instagram more heavily than maybe the average users. I don't think you're the only one that feels like Instagram Reels is a separate portal with weird content that you are not going to see elsewhere. I see a lot of like children that are like hustle-pilled kind of like 14-year-olds trying to become, you know, the next drop-shipping millionaire. There's a lot of religious content on there. And then there's a lot of sort of like stuff I would just describe as like brain rot almost, like just nonsensical stuff. It's all fringe and cringe. That is the best way to put it. It's fringe and cringe. Yeah, that's like all I see on my feet is is fringe and cringe. Of course you're going to see the re-uploaded TikToks.

But then you have this stuff from people that I don't think have ever posted on TikTok. Yeah. And that makes sense in one way, which is that we're talking about reels as if it's its own distinct app. And it's not. It's just part of Instagram. And one thing that I sort of forget is that if you post a video to Instagram and you think it's the year 2018 and you think that video is just going to go. onto your feed and be shown to your friends. That is not how it works anymore, right? Like a video on Instagram, it now gets sucked into this totally new world called Reels and like is completely

algorithmically blasted out to strangers. And I think that's partly why you're seeing so many, like, bizarre, normie posts by people who are like, sometimes I look at the accounts of people that I'm getting shown stuff by and they have like 10 followers. They've posted twice. Same. I'll look at a video and there's like 30 views on it. I'm like, how did I get picked for this one thing? It feels like you're discovering something. Yeah. Like it does.

And I love that. That's like, to me, that's like the magic of the internet is like I can look at other people. Like, you mean whatever they're doing. I love that. I'm with you. There's a divorce dad. I think I've posted him on my story before that I think has like less than 2,000 followers. and he just sort of posts about, he's, he's very thirsty, you know, like, he's, like,

I think I've seen this guy. I feel like, is he always, like, posting, like, or he'll be in, like, I want to say he's, like, kind of got, like, some sort of cowboy outfit kind of stuff. Yeah. Like, he'll be like, are you looking for a divorced dad who just wants to, like, tell you you're pretty? Like, you're, like, really, like, sweet, romantic stuff. But he's, like, really, like, normal, like, like, he looks like a guy from your hometown, you

less than 100 views. this man has barely 2,000 followers. And like, for some reason, I started getting his content. And I think it's so endearing. Like, there's something about the fact that, like, there's this sense of discovery. It's so rare to see anything on the internet now that doesn't already have 100,000 views by the time it's served to you. Yeah. I don't think Instagram is doing this on purpose. I think that the reason Reel's discovery is sort of so strange and different from TikTok and YouTube is that they actually have a worse recommendation system? How intentional do you think this is on meta's part? I don't think the experience that you and I are having where we're seeing like Randos with

10 views and we like are rolling in it, loving in it. I don't think that's meta's ideal experience, right? My theory is that they sort of have two things going on. One is like the supply and the control of the supply. One, the supply of videos is just kind of different than TikTok because of the way that people are historically used to posting on Instagram, like the supply of videos is just different. And then the way that they're sort of controlling it, the algorithm feels more reactive than TikTok. And if you're a heavy TikTok user,

you probably know that like, oh, if I click on this one video of like, you know, a deaf leopard clip from the 80s, I'm going to all of a sudden start seeing like tons of 80s hair metal music or whatever. But that don't fade away once it becomes clear. You're not interested in like that much of it. On Instagram, it's hair trigger reactive to what you're like lingering or liking or commenting or shit.

Like any sort of interaction you give the video, including watching the video in full length. It's not just like, would you like a second helping? It's like, take all of it. This is now you. Like, it's really reactive in that way. And I feel like people feel like they can control their algorithm in that way. Like, it almost reminds me of, you know, the Sorcerer's Apprentice when like Mickey's got all the buckets and the brooms. Oh, oh, like Fantasia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's like,

he's like sort of like making the mops, like all of a sudden, it's like it almost feels like you can do that, but the mops are like videos of 50 year old men just staring at the camera blankly, wordlessly with 10 followers. Like, you can trick your algorithm into getting like 20 of those in a row. What is some, maybe your second theory on why Instagram Reels is the way it is? So they made a change, Adam Sari, the head of Instagram, announced this May 1st. So it's sort of been rolling out. It's not completely rolled out yet. I feel like it seemed like a minor change.

But his description of how it actually works is actually pretty huge, I think. And it, in my opinion, explains some of this stuff. So his whole idea is like, we want to help small time creators get more views instead of our previous algorithm, which really benefited. big creator. So it used to be that, and I think I'm understanding this correctly, that when you made a post, it first sort of went into this like farm league bucket where it only, only your followers would see your content. And if your content was performing well amongst your followers, getting likes and comments or whatnot, then it would be distributed outside of them. Right. It would sort of, yeah, it would get kicked over to the recommendations. But it was always starting with followers and it was

always weighted very heavily towards followers. And so it privileged creators that had these massive Instagram audiences already. Right. And so then they made this chain saying, we want to get rid of the Farm League. As soon as you post, bam, recommendation engine. Any posts can be recommended to strangers. You don't have to, it doesn't have to like perform well among your followers first. And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of this weird content that has very few views, very very few likes, followers, like from seemingly really, really random people. I think that probably has something to do with, is my theory. So when we look at sort of this landscape of social platforms and how they've evolved,

obviously Instagram has gone through so many shifts over the years. How do you think that these changes are affecting the broader platform and like where it stands in its evolution? I feel like it's at a sort of growing pain stage right now where this, weird moment, I don't think it's going to last very long on Instagram. I think that it's going to get these weird rough edges that we're seeing will probably get smoothed out somehow and it'll start to look as slick and professional as the other apps sometime in the next year or so. We won't see so weird, what the heck am I seen kind of content. I think users want serendipity. And I think that's what

RELS has accidentally built into its algorithm, almost by being bad at recommendation. It's kind of allowed for this thing that I think we kind of associate with the early internet before algorithmic feeds. Yeah. I mean, I do think this is like a kind of existential question for Instagram, though. What I've seen a lot of is these complaints from people who want to be creators who want to get a lot of you saying, why won't you show my followers my posts anymore? I'm mad that I don't get as many, you know, I'm not getting as much as I used to be. And, you know, you're hearing those loud voices because they're loud voices, right? And what you're not seeing is, like, the people who just want to post to their 50 friends, and they're not really trying to do that much more than that.

And Instagram used to be a place where you just posted to your friends, and you weren't trying to consume creators. And so how does it balance its history as a place for friends with its sort of, future of being for creators. I know that you've been reporting on this and writing about it for Business Insider. What else did you find in your reporting on this phenomenon? There are a couple trends I've seen in sort of commenter behavior. One is on these weird videos, often I'll look at the comments because I'm like, what are people saying? And you'll see over and over and over again, and you might notice this if you see a weird video and you're like, what am I seeing? People go

mythical real pull or like mythical epic. You know, gold foil, real pull. I love that phrase because the idea is like the algorithm spun the wheel and you just happen to land on this one wacky thing. The other thing that is distressing and not great, and I think probably a big problem for meta, is like in general, I think the Instagram comments are way meaner than TikTok. It's so funny you mention that because I think they're vicious and cruel in a way that is so crazy because meta, as we know, has the strictest community guidelines on the planet. And yet,

no one is cyber bullied worse than somebody that posts the wrong reel and gets some comments. So I see a lot of, like, children under 13, and technically they're not supposed to be on the app. But like, we all know they are. I don't know what happens. They're not super young. But like, you know, it'll be sort of like an 11-year-old boy doing trying to make like a funny joke or something. and all the comments will be over and over again, try fentanyl. And people, and so much to the point where I was looking at one account for a child under 13, and the bio had been changed to say, I will not try fentanyl. Why is that?

It's so funny. That comment has been all over. And such cruel stuff. Another one is show hog. I'm sorry to laugh. That's like, it's not funny when you're saying it to a child. It's like I sort of try to remember that probably the people commenting that are also teenagers or also probably children. Teenage boys love making fun of cringe.

They love discovering cringe. They love making fun of cringe when really, you know, there's nothing more cringe than being a teenage boy. But it's true. Yeah, it's weird how cruel that people are and how outright mean. Yeah. Meta, I don't think, likes that. Right. Like they don't like the fact that there were children being bullied on their ass.

app. They don't like the fact that there's, you know, like this is a terrible experience for everybody involved, including Adam Masari. Yeah. Although they don't seem to ever want to do anything about it other than ban every word under the sun. Like, their content moderation systems are so blunt and so inept. And in some sense, not to sympathize with this, you know, terribly massive, you know, problematic tech company. But I do feel like they, you know, they were so lambasted by the media for not being like safe enough, you know, that they rolled out this really blunt and sort of terrible content moderation policies to try to make, like, look, look at the media. Look, we're making it safer. But it really hasn't made it safer because kids are just getting cyber bullied relentlessly all day,

as are just like random people every day, thanks to the Reels algorithm. If you already give us a little bit of a prediction of where you see Instagram Reels in the next, say, three years. How do you see it evolving? I don't know. I mean, like, the worry I have is that, like, all these apps kind of want to go the safest route, which is, like, try to look a little bit more like traditional entertainment, right? It's kind of like how Lindy Gechirino really wants to get, like, more sports clips onto, you know, X or, you know, things like that, having, you know, more, like, traditional celebrities posting stuff, more, like, traditional longer,

you know, looking a little bit more like YouTube where it's actually like a longer format instead of like weirdo videos. There was a moment where I thought Instagram was like, oh man, that's just like, it's dying out, right? Like it's, it's lost its way. And it actually like kind of hasn't. Like it's, it's numbers are back up. Things are going well on Instagram. Yeah. I saw that actually, I mean, Facebook revenue went up 22% recently and analysts cited Reels as a major part of that. I mean, one thing that I think is going to change when it comes to Reels the next few years is ads. We're just seeing a lot more ads interjected. I think it's going to be time to turn on the monetization engine for that feature in a really major way. Yeah. That actually is, I realized that my sort of flip of enjoyment between TikTok and Reels kind of coincided with when the TikTok shop launched and all of a sudden it seemed like I just kind of started in.

enjoying TikTok less where it just seemed like so much ads and shop content. And then Reels at the time was like completely ad free. Now occasionally I say like a little ad at the bottom or something. But yeah, I think that eventually it will be more of that. I just want the weird. I want them to keep it weird. Keep Instagram weird. I know. I like, I can't believe that that like Instagram is like the weird place. But here we are. Here we are. All right, Katie. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week. Thank you so much for having me. And please continue to send me all of the weirdest reels that you see. Oh, I will. We'll talk about this week's biggest stories after the break. All right, I'm here with my producer, Zach Mack, and we are going to talk about some of this week's

headlines. All right, let's do it. Well, the big news this week, I feel like, is that the Taylor Swift endorsement came through for Kamala Harris. She posted, obviously, on Instagram, right after the debate ended. Obviously, the campaign has been waiting for this endorsement for a while. There's been this excitement growing among fans. We saw Swifties for Kamala raising tons of money, you know, for her campaign. In this statement, I thought it was interesting that she mentioned generative AI as this kind of tipping point for her. She said that recently she was made aware of an AI image, I guess, of her falsely endorsing Donald Trump. And so that made her, you know, essentially want to give her real endorsement. She also didn't post this anywhere.

but Instagram, like she didn't post it on threads or Twitter, any text-based platform. And, of course, Elon already responded the next day being a very big creep. First, Elon tweeted, find Taylor, you win. I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life. And then a little bit later, he tweeted, toxoplasma Gandhi is a danger to our democracy. I do not understand that. Yeah, can you explain what the hell that means? Okay, so toxoplasma Gandhi is this parasite that is sometimes found in cats. And it basically, it comes from cats eating infected rodents or small animals. It's just this, basically, like, this infection that cats get that can be found in sort of, like, cat litter and stuff. And so I guess what he's saying is that this is somehow sort of infected Taylor and, you know, changed her to become a Democrat or whatever.

As if she's ever supported the Republican openly. So, yeah, I mean, Elon's obviously just, it's like off the charts level of cope. Somebody made a really funny tweet that was just like all of the times he's tried to get Taylor Swift's attention and how she's really never acknowledged his existence. Which, you know, such a power move when you can just blatantly ignore the richest man on her. You know, just like he's below you. It's a power move. It's like that madman meme where the guy is like, I feel bad for you to Don Draper. And Don Draper is like, I don't think about you at all.

So good. So good. Yeah. So what did you think about her, A.I. comments. I mean, she obviously doesn't spend much time in her statement about it, but she does mention it specifically. I think it's interesting that Taylor has struggled so much with generative AI. I think it shows that generative AI is just an increasingly important issue, especially to high profile figures like Taylor Swift, obviously on Elon Musk's own app, X. These really

inappropriate deepfakes of her went viral without her consent a little while ago, showing her and different sexual acts and things like that. So clearly this is an issue that's affecting people. And I think putting it on the radar of her millions of fans as well will make it a bigger issue going forward. Yeah, I was just reading something about how like these fake AI generated images aren't just being used to spread information, but just their existence alone makes real information harder to trust. Yeah, honestly, I think that's true of all misinformation. Yeah, good point. Another big misinformation scandal, by the way, Zach, I don't know if you saw,

but Semaphore just reported that this whole group of right-wing influencers on X were paid to promote sexual smears of Kamala Harris. There was a Zoom call where all of this was orchestrated, and George Santos was on the Zoom call. He was actually one of the only ones pushing back, saying that they shouldn't post these sort of sexualized smears of her. But it's really unclear who funded this operation, who was paying for it. That's stuff that we don't know yet. It kind of reminds me of the news that broke last week about Tenet Media. Tenet Media was this right-wing influencer network that managed a bunch of conservative YouTubers, including Tim Poole, Lauren Southern, Benny Johnson, a bunch of other people.

If you don't know these names, God bless you. But they're all basically conservative YouTubers that were getting paid $100,000 per YouTube video by this Russian disinformation outlet, basically. Both of these stories together just show the amount of money being poured into the right-wing content creator ecosystem to try to influence the election. Yeah, business is booming. We could use some of that money for our own YouTube channel. You're trying to get the Russian disinfo money for power users back. Hey, money is money, you know? No, it is seemingly everywhere. This dark money to spread and misinformation is just popping up over and over again. And it all is coming, seeming. seemingly on the right. Well, of course. I mean, there's, oh, I wrote about this in my newsletter,

but it's always been an issue on the right. I mean, the right has always received a massive amount of funding from dark money groups, special interest groups, billionaires, etc. There is no funding mechanism like that on the left at all. I think it's also interesting that, you know, back in 2016, the concerns were all around these like bot farms and fake pages, you know, like basically these Russians were setting up like troll accounts, people that didn't exist. Now, I think they've realized all of these bad actors, it's much easier to just pay right-wingers who will say and do whatever you want than try to create these fake networks from scratch. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem with not knowing where the funding is coming

behind some of the creator content industry stuff. Yeah, I think this is the big issue here. I mean, with conservative media, look, a lot of right-wing media has always been bought and paid for by special interests or right-wing billionaires or bad actors and things like that. And I'm talking about, you know, the sort of the far-right blogs and these digital media sites that came up very much around the first Trump term. But the content creator industry is different. And we just don't know as much about who funds a lot of these operations. A lot of them are smaller operations. They're more under the radar. They're more behind the scenes. So something like tenant media, you know, I think hasn't had, you know, their funding scrutinized necessarily until the Department of Justice came in.

So I feel like it would benefit everybody to know a little bit more about funding in the creator economy, you know, across the political spectrum. Although, again, those on the left are not getting anywhere near this type of money. They're lucky if they can get, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month, some of them from their crowdfunding campaigns. Brown of Sacks, my colleague at the Washington posted a really crazy story this week about Facebook removing alerts about fires during at least 20 wildfires since June. Basically, people from local city councils or even the Red Cross and others have tried to post about the danger of wildfires coming. They'll post an alert saying, like, Ridge Fire on Highway 20 near Walker Ridge Road, be careful. Organizations that posted about wildfire warnings were told that they violated the company's community standards on spam due to trying to get likes,

follows, shares, or views in a misleading way. It happened primarily with links, but even to official sites from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, the sheriff's Department and other groups that monitor fire and disasters in real time. To me, this just shows once again how poor meta's community guidelines are and just how blunt and harmful their moderation practices are. Yeah, this just continues the degradation of Facebook as a useful tool, right? It's like they're deemphasizing news. You can't warn people of fires. It's an AI spam graveyard. It's just like, what is Facebook even for anymore? Well, they're just so scared of anything to do with news or information, that they're literally preventing people from getting really crucial

information that could help save their life about a wildfire or natural disaster. It just seems so irresponsible, and I wish that they would just roll back a lot of these really blunt moderation systems. Yeah. It's also just hard because where do you go in times of disaster? Twitter is a complete mess. There's no real-time news network. Facebook is where you would traditionally go to find out a lot of local news about your community, where do people get this information? There's certainly that, you know, no one has TVs anymore. They're not listening to the radio. You got to go to next door. I think that brings up a good point is it is unclear where to go for real time emergency related news. Like, you know, if there were an earthquake or a flood or a fire,

where, where do you go? I'm actually not sure. I would probably still go to Twitter, but like it is less and less useful for that kind of stuff. Yeah. There's, just nowhere to go. So there's a new iPhone out, Zach. I don't know if you saw, but Apple released the new iPhone 16 this week, or at least teased it. It has a lot of new AI features. Are you going to be upgrading? Yeah, eventually. I never get the phone immediately because it usually doesn't seem that pressing, but I will get it eventually. I agreed with Mike Isaac at the New York Times when he said AI product demos at all of these companies still feel like solutions in search of a problem. And it kind of felt like that a lot to me as well. I don't think that there's a lot. I don't think that there's

a huge difference between these phones anymore. I know they're trying to make AI, like, the new thing, but also a lot of this stuff is just software upgrades that anybody's going to be able to use. Right. I don't think that it's significantly better, but there are some pretty cool things. I mean, like, I thought that the photo cleanup stuff where you could remove these unwanted objects really, easily, and just being able to search for photos using natural language. This is something that I've wanted forever. It's actually crazy to me that you can't go on your phone and just be like, show me all the pictures of cats and have the right pictures come up. I do like that feature. It's especially handy anytime I need a photo of like my ID or passport.

Yeah. Yeah, because I always forget where that is. Yeah, our phones are getting smarter. There's more AI. I saw that there's a whole chat GPT integration. I'm sure that'll be kind of helpful. But yeah, it didn't seem like a like a significant difference in the phone, especially when I'm going to get the software update for my iPhone 14 or 15. I actually don't even know which phone I have because they all function basically the same. Yeah, I think what Apple does do a good job of is sort of bringing certain pieces of technology to the masses. You know, like wearables or even music streaming,

like they weren't first movers in the space, but they kind of normalize tech to a lot of people. So I think with this AI stuff, I don't know that it's going to be enough to really differentiate the iPhone 16 from the iPhone 15 necessarily. But I do think that it might get a lot more people using AI tools and getting more comfortable with those tools on a regular basis.

All right, same. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jalani Carter. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producer is Zach Mack.

Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week. See you then.