Muse, Meta’s artificial intelligence agent, can do many wonderful and useful things. It can help you organize your inbox, book your travel plans, and buy you lunch.
But one thing Meta decided it shouldn’t brag about is its ability to track who has unfollowed you on Instagram.
About a week ago, Rachel Karten, who writes the excellent marketing newsletter Link in Bio, noticed a strange ad on Instagram. The ad encourages people to download Muse, with an image of its blurry mascot holding a red and green Tinder-style sign advising you to “see who has unfollowed you every week.”
Ever since the Instagram app first launched, people have wondered who unfollowed you on Instagram. But Instagram has avoided adding this feature to its own app, and for good reason.
I contacted Meta about this seeming conflict, and a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the ad has been removed and is no longer active in the Meta ad library.
Instagram doesn’t want you to know you unfollowed
Here’s the tension: Instagram knows people want this feature, but it also knows it will hurt the vibe of the platform.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri regularly does AMAs on his personal account, where he answered questions about why there’s no “Who Unfollowed Me” feature. His reasoning (which disappeared from his page but has been aggregated in other videos) was that they wanted to make people feel comfortable untracking people they were no longer interested in.
To most people, it’s obvious that this feature might hurt people’s feelings, especially younger users (let’s assume Instagram does care about how teenage users feel, although I understand if you have some hesitation about this). A bad user experience when using the platform is a bad experience!
This is ultimately bad for Instagram as well. If you’re not willing to unfollow accounts you don’t like, you’ll end up with a less engaging feed, and you’ll end up opening Instagram less often or spending time on it. That’s not good for Instagram’s daily active user metrics!
Yes, Muse can actually do that
There are now third-party services that can track who has untracked you. These sometimes require access to your login information in a way that I definitely don’t recommend, and can track who has unfollowed you over time. So it’s not like Muse is doing something completely new or unheard of.
I asked Muse to do it for me, and it said it could – but there was a caveat: It would start tracking my followlist to see who had unfollowed me, but it wouldn’t be able to retroactively check who had unfollowed me in the past (which is basically the same as other trackers). Honestly? I don’t want to know! no thanks! oops!
I asked Muse to track who unfollowed me on Instagram (even though I didn’t really want to know). It could only track forward, but two days later, it was found. business insider
Is this just a stupid ad? Yes. Is it set up and run as an ad by someone at Meta, so far removed from Instagram’s philosophy of unfollowing? perhaps. If Meta ran an ad and then took it down, would that be the most shocking news in the world? No.
But it interests me deeply because it touches on a larger, thornier question. Meta clearly believes that artificial intelligence agents like Muse are the future of the company and the way people use its services. But the capabilities and use cases of artificial intelligence agents may be inconsistent with the nature of social media.
In the simplest way, an AI agent is supposed to help you be more efficient and get your work done. Social media should help you waste time.
These are two very different goals – it will be interesting to see how these two new technological pillars of Meta conflict or complement each other.
We already have a meta-product (Muse) that is more than happy to do things that another meta-product (Instagram) has long discouraged.
There are many other functions that people think Do it on social media, but Instagram and Facebook don’t allow it because it’s not good for the overall health of the platform. Suddenly, artificial intelligence agents like Muse can do these long-forbidden things. The question is: How far is Meta willing to cannibalize the health of its social platform in order to develop artificial intelligence?