Interface Live: Casey Newton and Sarah Frier talk Instagram’s hidden history

Part of The Verge's Interface Live series, silicon valley editor Casey Newton talks with Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier about her new book No Filter, which delves into the history of Instagram and how the app became what it is today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Eli from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we've got something a little bit different. Our own Casey Newton held an Interface Live event with Sarah Frier. She's a Bloomberg reporter and the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. It's a new book, just came out, chronicles Instagram's founding, its growth, its buyout by Facebook, its meteoric growth inside of Facebook, and the eventual split of its founders after some disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg. Super interesting book, great conversation between Casey and Sarah. Thank you to the hundreds of people who tuned into the Interface Live. We're going to do way more of those, but check it out. It's Casey Newton and Sarah Frier talking about her book, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  All right. Hello, good evening, good morning, depending on where you are in the world. I'm Casey Newton, I'm the Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, and I want to welcome you to the first ever virtual Interface Live. Last year, we started an event series where I started talking to some of the most interesting newsmakers and writers who are on this beat of social media, platforms, democracy. And for a long time, I've been looking forward to what we are about to do tonight. My guest tonight is Sarah Frier. She is a spectacular reporter at Bloomberg, and for the past few years, she's been working

• 1:25Speaker 01

  on a book about the history of Instagram. It came out last week, and it is fantastic. It's called No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. Tonight, we're going to talk all about it. We're going to have some poll questions for you to answer, to make sure you're still paying attention. And throughout tonight's talk, you can submit questions using the Q&A feature in Zoom, and Zoe Schiffer, my colleague at the Interface, will pick through those and figure out which are going to be some interesting ones for Sarah and I to get into. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you for joining, and why don't we go ahead and bring Sarah into the Zoom. Sarah, are you there?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  I'm here, I can hear you. Thanks for having me, I'm excited for this.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Well, I'm excited as well. Now that we've started, I'm going to turn off my virtual background, and I'm going to welcome you. Wait, that's a... that's what... That's my improv troupe. How can I just turn off my virtual background? Why is this a problem? None, that's what I'm looking for. Wonderful. And now we're here. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me. Let's hop right into it. Should Instagram have sold to Facebook?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. I mean, depends what perspective you're asking from. I mean, they definitely benefited from Facebook's resources. They benefited from the ability to not have to hire a ton of people once they joined. The spam detection technology. These are the things that Facebook said when they they put out their statement and saying that if I had, my book had underemphasized the amount of investment that they put into Instagram. That's what they're talking about. I think what what happened, though, is you see this company so dominant over how we live, so dominant over how we communicate. And Instagram ultimately didn't get to control the future of that.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think I don't have a, I don't have an opinion. I wish I did, but I think that it's impossible to know what reality would look like otherwise.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's a fair answer.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  The hard thing to do would be to go without selling.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  It would have been much harder. Well, so I want to like sort of throw it open to everyone who's here so that they can start weighing in. So I think we're going to have a poll pop up for you, whether you think Instagram could have succeeded as an independent company. So you can vote on that and we'll get some some answers later. We are not allowed to vote in our own poll. But while people are thinking about that, let's let's take a step back. What was your first encounter with Instagram? And what did it mean to you before you started reporting on it?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I started using Instagram when I first moved to New York City, when I had just graduated from college. And I, I really, it resonated with me as a way to use my phone. I'd just gotten my first iPhone. Previously, I had a Palm Pre. I don't know if anyone remembers that, but that was, it was my college phone. And my iPhone had a great camera. And Instagram made it a lot better. And so I started taking pictures around my neighborhood. I think my first picture is some of some like bread pudding. It's not appetizing at all. I didn't know the rules, but I I liked it as a way to to just. I I've spent so much of my career covering Facebook, covering Twitter, using those for my career.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Instagram for a long time was a place where I could just kind of be myself and and see my friends. Obviously, choosing to write a book about the company negates that option. But for a while, yeah, it was just a place that I would go see what was happening in creative world.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Right, and and now it is a a big monolith. So, you know, we we budgeted about forty five minutes for questions and then we're going to take some Q and A. And I could talk to you about the history of Instagram for approximately six hours. But I had to make some hard cuts. So I basically don't want to talk about the early days of the company. Because I think many people on this at this event might be a little bit more familiar with that. And what I love about your book is all of the juicy details you bring us about what happened after the acquisition. But I should at least ask about the acquisition itself, because that is a pretty incredible story in its own right.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And one of the things that you get at is how what a small world Silicon Valley is. And how Kevin Systrom knew basically all of the big players in the social networking space long before he founded Instagram, right? So he he had met Mark Zuckerberg, you know, in in Facebook's early days. He had worked for for Jack Dorsey. And to me, that raises the question of was it inevitable that Instagram was going to sell? Because Kevin was so plugged into this network and was dealing with people who I think had a very good sense of what him and Mike Krieger were building.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I think you're absolutely right. The relationships matter so much to who succeeds in Silicon Valley. And the fact that Kevin already knew Mark, actually Mark tried to hire him back in 2005 and he said, no, he wanted to graduate Stanford. And he knew Jack, they worked together. Jack helped him learn how to code. I mean, that's how close these ties are and how far they go back. And I, but I don't think that relationships are the only thing that determined whether Systrom wanted to sell. Because although Zuckerberg has framed himself as an early mentor of Systrom, I don't think that that's the case. I think that they knew each other from afar. There was a, there was a respect

• 7:15Speaker 02

  there, respect for Zuckerberg, building what he built, and respect for Systrom for having this really popular app that was eating into something that Facebook wished that they were doing right. But the stronger relationship by far was between Systrom and Jack Dorsey. It started actually really as a friendship. And then Jack became, when he was ousted from Twitter, he became one of the first angel investors in Instagram, basically because Systrom was the first to ask him if he would. And he was very flattered by that. It stroked his ego. And then Jack was one of the reasons why Instagram became so successful, because he had an early Twitter following, and he kept promoting Instagram over and over and

• 7:57Speaker 02

  over on Twitter. And so everyone in the Valley was using it. And Systrom simultaneously courted a lot of creatives to use it. And when Twitter finally decided, when they finally got their act together to acquire Instagram after a couple of false starts, Systrom said no. And I think he said no, because it was almost too similar. Like, it didn't solve the problems that Facebook would solve for them, which is the engineering power, but most of all, the ability to stay independent, and the ability to go into a bigger company and still be considered a founder, and still be respected for that vision that a founder has, this aura around a founder that they all have in Silicon Valley. Mark,

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Understood that about Kevin's ego and was able to cater to it in his deal making.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will say that like the question of what like the alternate history of a world where Twitter bought Instagram, like wow, do I want to go read, you know, about what life in that universe would be like. For what it's worth, 80% of you believe that Instagram could have succeeded as an independent company. So fairly strong majority. So Sarah, you bring up the big narrative around the Instagram acquisition, which is that Facebook was going to let it remain independent. What do you think that word meant to Facebook at the time? What did it mean to Instagram? And was it ever true?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Facebook and Instagram had no idea what that meant. It just really sounded good. It was like, it was like, oh yeah, you'll have all the independence and none of the risk and all of the resources and it'll be great. And the way that an early deals guy on the deal explained it to me, he was like, Amin Zofin, and he was like, it's a beautiful plant. You don't trim the plant when it's still growing. I mean, they were thinking about it in the total abstract. And for a company so focused on growing, on metrics, on trying to like incrementally get more people to use its product, it was a pretty wild, it was like a wild card. No one at Facebook knew what they were going to do with it. And Zuckerberg, the only thing he knew was that like Instagram had some magic and they need to, needed to figure it out.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  But right away, there started to be some cracks in the relationship because, as you know, everyone at Facebook is very attuned to their bonus and their metrics and how they would succeed at the company. And they all succeed by growing the product. And Instagram comes in and they barely settled into this tiny garage room at Facebook HQ. And the first thing that the growth team says to Instagram is, I wish we could help you, but first we need to figure out if people posting photos on Instagram is a threat to Facebook. Once they figure that out, you're friends with us. But first, we got to check if you're not going to kill us. Okay, now that that study is inconclusive, please add all of these notifications to your app.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So it seems like a really fun way to get started at a new company.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  It was so jarring and these Instagram guys, I mean, it's almost cute. Like, they're all these quirky, creatives, like, urban professionals who were just trying to make it in the world. Like, none of them, almost none of them got rich off the deal. They're hoping that they can come and grow this into something really powerful with this big tie to a community. And Facebook is like, like, turn on the engines, you guys, like, grow, grow, grow. And it's very grating for the people who appreciate quirky culture niches.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Right. Well, OK, so there's this flip side to this, though, right? Which, you know, as somebody who has written a lot about content moderation, I think I was very sensitive to this, this one thing that happened, which you've already brought up, which is basically one of the very first things that the Instagram team does once they land at Facebook, is they give up content moderation, right? Like, their very small team had been reviewing all of the reports of bad stuff that was happening on the network. And within the first month, they have offloaded that to whoever does that at Facebook, which, of course, as we know, is, you know, at the time was a bunch of foreign workers. Now it's, you know, both foreign workers and people working here in the United States.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Why did they give that up so quickly? And then I have an editorial comment about it.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  So just imagine you're an early Instagram employee and your job is to have a shift, to deal with all of the shit on Instagram. And you go, you have your morning shift, and then someone has the afternoon shift, and then someone has the evening shift. And then who knows what happens in Asia where you're asleep. And then you wake up and you do it all over again. And they actually would usually manage, in 2011, they would usually manage to clear the queue of reports that came in. By the time they joined Facebook, they had 80 million users. There was no way that they could get through everything. They had no system for, like, prioritizing it or... Are sorting through it and there was they were already like missing things.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  There was a huge spam problem. And so to them, they were thinking, well, Facebook really knows how to do this at scale. They have a billion people using Facebook. Like this is probably better for our users if we pass it along to them. But of course, Facebook, as you have noted in your coverage, was not doing it in a way that was very personalized and attuned to what people needed. It was more like get through as many as you possibly can. Whereas Instagram employees, like one Instagram employee told me that she would like personally send messages to people who were thinking of committing suicide and saying it on Instagram. She would like send them resources from various organizations in their country.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Like that takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of human touch. And they were super relieved that it wasn't their problem anymore.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Right. So that all makes sense. At the same time, you know, I see moderation as an essential pillar of any social network, right? Deciding what gets to stay on the network and what has to come down is so fundamental to what the network becomes. So to me, the moment that Instagram decided that they were not going to play a role in that is a moment that they actually gave up a lot of their independence. And much later in the book, you write about how they wanted more resources to work on some Instagram specific moderation issues around the sale of opioids and some bullying stuff. And they get told, no, like we have a central, you know, moderation team now that does that.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And I wonder if a lot of that independence game, they sort of gave up walking in the door in a way that they probably weren't fully thinking through.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that I, I think that Instagram became extremely good at highlighting what was working about their platform, which is one reason why we hear so many fuzzy things about Instagram and whether it's like the art that's happening on Instagram or the celebrities or whatever, like Instagram is seeding a lot of that in our, in our media. On the flip side, like, taking down the bad stuff, they just weren't even prioritizing that for a very long time. It wasn't until, uh, maybe 2016 that Kevin Systrom started to see a lot of the negative things happening around Facebook's brand image. And he realized, oh, my gosh, like, maybe we should care about people's well-being and bullying and things like that.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  It it really was like a wake-up call that came in part from Taylor Swift. Like, it was a really, it was a transition for him wanting to have, like, the refuge on the internet where people went to escape the other, you know, viral content hubs. And that was kind of too late to think about it.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, let's, let's move to another subject. You have brought up Facebook's famous paranoia about competitive threats, which I think is certainly one of the big reasons why Facebook acquired Instagram. But as you mentioned up top, they continue to be terrified of Instagram even after they acquired it. And you tell the story in the book of this engineer at Instagram named Gregory Hockmuth. And like a month after the acquisition, he meets with the Facebook camera team. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Facebook camera team was and like what that conversation was?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  There was just like a lunch meeting that appeared on his calendar. And when he goes to lunch with these guys, they're like, oh, yeah, we were created to kill you. Like, sort of matter of fact, not like, hey, welcome to Facebook. Maybe they said welcome, but that was the part that really sticks out is with this, this early employee is just that, like, welcome to Facebook, good luck, like, if you weren't here, you would be dead. Which I think is, it's, that's how they do their deals, too. I mean, the way Zuckerberg tried to acquire Snapchat in the early days is he was like, he, he was like, hey, you know, what do you think about joining, blah, blah, blah. When Evan Spiegel says no, he says, okay, well, here's poke.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  We're about to launch this thing, just thought you should know about it. It's not too late to say yes. And of course, Poke completely fizzled and none of us, I don't know if anyone on this call ever used it, but that's kind of how they would play things.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  I did use Poke and I remember at the time, the notable thing about Poke was that Mark had personally contributed code to it, like that little tidbit came out. But like most people, I did not use Poke for very long. You know, one of the other pieces of news you break in the book is that there was a second, previously unreported attempt for Facebook to buy Snapchat. And it's sort of interesting to think about, you know, if Spiegel had taken the deal, would he also have had a lunch with like, here's the Stories team, where the Stories team says, oh, hey, by the way, our job is to kill you, you know?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that that's, first of all, Evan Spiegel, like he would, could never really work for Mark Zuckerberg. Those two would, Kevin Systrom is more diplomatic. He is very good at like navigating personalities and he's not very like mono-a mono competitive. Whereas I think Evan Spiegel is just such an individual that I don't see those guys working together. But Mark Zuckerberg calls him on the eve of Instagram launching Instagram Stories, which gives you a sense of how Zuckerberg believes that product will work out. Because if Instagram is about to launch Stories and he's like, hey, we could still

• 18:51Speaker 02

  use you guys, it didn't bode well. And then of course, Instagram Stories catches on in a tremendous way, accelerating Instagram's growth. And that's when the real tension starts happening with Facebook.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  But we'll, I'm sure we'll get to that later.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Sure. So well, let's get into some of those tensions. You know, the book is really in part a story about these two corporate cultures clashing. And the Facebook culture you depict as kind of the growth at all costs culture, right? The job at Facebook is to win. And at Instagram, the job seemed like it was much more to have good taste and to be cool. And these two things sort of clash in pretty hilarious ways. And there's this very funny anecdote you share about right when the company joined, where Systrom and Andrew Bosworth, sort of longstanding Facebook executive who now runs the hardware division,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  they get into a fight about their shirts. Can you talk about this?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. So they're at this Greek restaurant about to meet with some advertisers. Kevin is not allowed to advertise on Instagram yet. Uh, and because Zuckerberg, of course, wants it to grow more first. And then he takes a look at Andrew Bosworth's shirt. And he's like, hey, man, I like your shirt. And Bos is like, OK, oh, thanks. Yeah, I got this at like a London hackathon. And Kevin says, oh, it says, keep calm and hack on? Oh, sorry, I don't like your shirt.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Right. He thought it said like rock on and it said hack on.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. He thought it was like one of those cool London shirts. Then Bos is like, well, at least my shirt fits me. And Kevin's like, well, this shirt costs more than your car. And they're just like, they're just like sparring with each other. And people were like, OK, look, guys, like, all right, let's go into the meeting now. But it just kind of shows when Kevin joins Facebook. It's this world of hackers and they all think they know best. They all think that data is the right way to tell the story. They all think that by people spending more time on Facebook, by them liking more things, by them sharing more things, that means they like Facebook more. And connecting the world is really like, like marketing speak for getting bigger. And Kevin Systrom is like, yo, I have taste.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Like, you don't need to spam people with notifications. You don't need to, uh, you know, send them incessant emails telling them to log back into their accounts. Like, what about you just have good stuff on your product and then they'll want to come? And give people a good feeling when they use it and like make it really simple and easy and fast. And all the Facebook guys were like, this guy is really arrogant. Like, I don't, I don't get this. So that tension in the early days. Eventually, Bos ends up loving Kevin and defending him in later discussions with Zuckerberg. But in the early days, it was just really funny.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Well, and like everything that you just said gets to why I, and I think probably, you know, millions of other people really liked Instagram, right? Like, even though it is fun to read about those skirmishes, Instagram's good taste really did a lot for the app for a

• 22:02Speaker 01

  A long time and you know, as you get into 2016 and Facebook has all these problems associated with its brand, the majority of Americans still had no idea that Facebook owned it. And I have to believe that at least some part of that was just it looked and felt very different. It acted very different. It was not sending the million notifications, right?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  One of the biggest things, one of the biggest differences between how Facebook works and how Instagram works is Instagram actually had an editorial opinion about what content was good and what content was not good. And they would, they would be kingmakers. They would decide like this person's account is really interesting and they would post it on the at Instagram account, which actually has more followers than any Kardashian. It's like probably around 350 million now. And the second they would post about somebody, they would have a great prospects for their, for their business or their career or whatever it might be. And they would get more famous, they would get more attention, they would get more distribution. So they would do that. They would do community meetups. They would

• 23:08Speaker 02

  have themed events. They would have Sistrum go out and personally meet with celebrities and fashion people and chefs and even the Pope at one point with Charles Porch, the head of partnerships in tow, who's like the mastermind of this whole thing and get them to use Instagram and teach them how to use Instagram. And if they have a problem, they have somebody to call. They have Kevin Sistrum's cell phone number. They can call him and get help. And so that really creates this, this ecosystem of people who are super devoted to the product and feel indebted to the team and have this like personal relationship

• 23:51Speaker 02

  with Instagram. And that really fuels the future. And that's one of the things that Facebook thought was super frivolous because they were like, why would you ever, if you're trying to get big, why would you ever focus your attentions on one person or one account when you could instead be building something that affects? Tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people. Like, what's the point? And what they're missing there is that on Facebook, you have resharing, and so you have content going viral. On Instagram, you have people who get popular. There's no resharing. It's just, it's the people who end up being the pillars of what's good on Instagram and really causing the growth.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Well, and that gets at something else that happens over the life of Instagram that is interesting and worth talking about, which is the rise of influencers. And one of the things your book does really well is kind of tells the story of some of the first Instagram influencers. And because there are really no rules, they start advertising without disclosing that they are doing advertising. This falls under the purview of the Federal Trade Commission, which had also had the job of deciding whether the acquisition should have been allowed in the first place. And of course, the FTC winds up saying, yes, the acquisition is fine, and winds up doing very little to regulate these influencers.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So we're going to put up our second poll question, which I'm curious to know. Should the FTC have allowed the acquisition of Instagram? Curious to get your thoughts about that. So you should see that poll popping up here shortly. But Sarah, can you talk to us a bit about the role that the FTC should have played in the life of Instagram? And the role that it actually did play?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  When the acquisition was under review in the summer of 2012, it was a grueling process for the employees because they had no idea if they were going to be allowed to join Facebook, and yet they were growing super fast. The FTC brings Kevin Systrom out to DC and just peppers him with questions about like, OK, so what software did you build this on? And like, how is the app structured? Is that different than Facebook? And they're like, we love Instagram.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  And Zuckerberg was like, no, I'm not going out to DC. He joins via video call. And meanwhile, Facebook is sending information to regulators about the competitive landscape. And in one document they sent, in one package they sent to the UK commissioner looking into this, they explained that Instagram was just one of many photo sharing apps. You've got Instagram, you've got Camera Plus, you've got Hipstamatic, you've got Camera Awesome, like all of these ones, you've got Path, that are also trying to do photos on mobile. And in fact, Facebook also does photos on mobile. So like, who knows if this is, you know, going to be a surviving app.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  But what they missed is something that Zuckerberg knew to be true from the very earliest days, the network effect. Once there is a mass of people using a product, there's very few reasons to join anything else. And by the time Instagram is being reviewed by the FTC, you've got Justin Bieber, to President Obama, to all of these photographers. It's become a part of our culture already, even with a couple tens of millions of users. And I think that's what they really didn't understand about competition, is that you're not just competing for creating a photo product on the internet. You are competing for people's attention and their social connections.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  And so I think Zuckerberg was the only one who really understood that Instagram should be worth a billion dollars, which now seems so cheap, but at the time, nobody had ever paid that for a mobile app.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  That's right. And also, one of the other like interesting facts in your book is that the acquisition didn't even turn out to be a billion dollars, right? Like due to like fluctuations in the stock price?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Facebook's stock starts plunging and it ends up being about 715 million. And a lot of the Instagram employees don't even get rich off it.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was even more of a bargain, I think, than than people give it credit for. Why did the FTC not play much of a role in regulating influencer advertising to start with?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. So, once Instagram created a tool where you could say your content was branded content, then the onus fell off Instagram and on to all of these individual influencers, which is an economy that's very difficult to police. The FTC has sent a lot of warning letters, a lot of like, you know, maybe don't do this, maybe don't attempt to deceive people about how you got this product. But they didn't really do anything. They were just slaps on the wrist. And they put out a lot of guidelines, like, you should probably use hashtag sponsored and have it at the beginning of the post. And I think it was really just

• 29:04Speaker 02

  this game of chicken, where the FTC thought Instagram was going to enforce this, or that agencies were going, advertising agencies were going to enforce this. And Instagram was like, well, isn't this really like, you know, we have the tool, like, one, now that we have the tool, isn't it going to be up to the advertising agencies or the FTC? And so I think it was really just like, pushing off the responsibility on to others. And meanwhile, we as consumers still can't tell what is branded and what is just like, a real recommendation.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it remains a trust problem for them. Well, we've got about 10 minutes left before we're going to start getting to some viewer questions. So, let's talk about when it all started to go wrong. Why did Mike and Kevin leave Instagram?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  They were being put into a position where they felt like they could no longer be these, like, founder visionaries. And I think Zuckerberg knew that that would push them out. I think he understood that, you know, just like he understood what would make these guys tick and get them to be acquired by Facebook, he understood that by taking their freedoms away, by restricting their resources, by telling them their teams had to report up to Facebook teams, or that they, instead of using Instagram-specific resources, they would have to use Facebook resources. He must have known that that would not only make it less exciting for them to work at Facebook, but also make it impossible for them to achieve their vision in a way that

• 30:32Speaker 02

  didn't require just layers and layers of bureaucracy. And they were frustrated. I think that, you know, I described Kevin Systrom as like the ultimate self improver. He gets really obsessive about whatever he wants to do next, whether it's riding a bike or perfecting latte art. Like, he gets really into things. I said earlier that he's not like mono a mono competitive. He's competitive with himself. Like, he's trying to always like be the best version. And at this time, he's like trying to be the best version of a CEO. Like, he's got Ray Dalio mentoring him. He's reading all the books. He's like trying to be like a leader of a company with a billion users with Mark Zuckerberg as the nice man on his board.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  And like the competing visions there, like where Zuckerberg is just like, well, you leave the Instagram department and you report up to Chris Cox. And, you know, it's great that you have opinions, but I'm the CEO.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it seems to me that up until very late in the game, Systrom really believed that he had a degree of independence. And it's quite easy for me actually to envision a world where him and Mike Krieger were still there. If Zuckerberg had let them continue to build their own roadmap, had given them more resources, I could see them being there. I think like that there will probably always be some sadness with them that they didn't get to go as far as they wanted to. I think an interesting question is, would that be good for Facebook if they were still there?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  I think that, so we had Kevin Systrom on Bloomberg Television on Friday, and Emily Chang asked him about my book, and he claimed to have not read it, which was funny. He also said that, you know, the way the story ends, he said Mark Zuckerberg is a very logical person, and if Instagram is the future of Facebook, the logical thing to do would be to invest in it. And that's a very veiled way of saying Zuckerberg is not acting in a logical manner. That if he were thinking about what was best for the future of Facebook Inc., that he would invest more in Instagram. And actually, I think about it not in terms like, how do we define success?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Right? Because I don't think about it in terms of like, would this platform be bigger? Would they make more money? Like, I think they're making plenty of money. I think they're plenty big. Like, I'm not worried about that. When I think about success, I think about that vision of like, helping the people who use Instagram and like, depend on this, not just for a place to connect with friends and family, but increasingly for their livelihoods. There are 6 million people who have more than a million followers on Instagram. There are more than 200 million people who have more than 50,000 followers on Instagram, which likely means that they have some sort of economic tie to the platform. And their customer service is like, nonexistent or outsourced to Facebook.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Unless you know an employee, you can't really get anything done. The problems on Instagram are festering because they're very different types of problems than Facebook has. So, yeah, would they be more successful if Kevin and Mike had more resources and were there and could actually attend to the problem of Instagram's users? Yes.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, that all resonates with me. I also see it from Facebook's perspective as well, though. So, you know, I think it's important to remember that around the time they were leaving, what was going on at Facebook? Well, it was in the middle of its longest series of sustained crises that it had ever had. It was digging out of the fallout of the 2016 election. People were accusing it of all manner of crimes related to data privacy, competition. And I think that for a while, for, you know, five-plus years, it was useful to Zuckerberg to have his lieutenants off running their own little fiefdoms,

• 34:43Speaker 01

  growing in whatever way that felt right to them. But then there came a point where he needed everyone rowing in the same direction. And all of a sudden, Mike and Kevin and Jan Kuhman, Brian acting at WhatsApp, them all having different ideas about things, started to feel counterproductive.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  I see that too, because if you're dealing with regulators, if you're dealing with the amount of scrutiny that Facebook is getting, especially on like the antitrust side and the election interference side, all those places need to communicate. They shouldn't have like several different teams dealing with election interference. I see the logic of that. And I actually don't think that investing in fixing the problems of Instagram requires Kevin and Mike to be there. I think they could just decide to do it as well under Adam Mosseri. It's just that right now Instagram is a lower priority for Facebook. And that's because all of the products' issues are like centralized, being dealt with by Facebook. And the problems that Facebook has are not the same.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Because if you're using computer vision, machine learning, all these things as applied to the Facebook product, it doesn't necessarily translate over to Instagram. And if you're trying to build different, it takes engineering resources to build different systems to handle Instagram's problems, which have to do with anonymity or have to do with accounts that have no virality to them. I think you have to look at those problems a different way.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that leads me to my last question. And I should say, I didn't, never saw what the results were for our second poll question. So if someone could send those to me, I would love to announce those. But a question I think about sometimes and have written about is, does Instagram still exist in a meaningful way? Is Instagram still an actual thing with a defined community, a defined point of view? We're gonna, we're gonna put this out there as a poll question as well. Is Instagram, does Instagram still exist? Or is it just kind of a different looking front end to the Facebook service now? Sarah, do you have a thought about that?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  So the way that Instagram, I just started to answer this as the last question, but the way that Instagram functions is so different without resharing, without the requirement to use your real names and without the friend-to-friend model. Like, you don't have to befriend people who follow you on Instagram. You have a completely different type of environment where you're following people who are adhering to your interests or maybe even just that you're curious about. You can connect with celebrities. So I think it is, I think that Facebook has attempted to do this on Facebook, in Facebook groups, in Facebook pages, but it's never really caught on in the way that Instagram has.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  And I've seen them try to replicate it over. Like, for example, if you want to advertise on Instagram, you have to have a Facebook page. And I've been getting notifications to go to people's Facebook pages that they don't post on because they just have them as like a reason to be able to post ads on Instagram. So I think that like what Facebook is trying to do right now is derive more of the Instagram magic into the mothership and meanwhile, send less people over to Instagram. Fewer people, I should say.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Right. I think that is a good way of putting it. For the number three poll, 80% said that yes, Instagram does still exist as a standalone thing. That's interesting. And then on the second question, should the FTC have approved the acquisition? 40% of you said yes and 60% said no. Very interesting. Let's go ahead and ask, or rather, answer some questions that you all have submitted. And you still have some time if you want to ask something of Sarah. Jeremy Dunning says, "It seems like Instagram avoided a lot of the heat that other platforms received in the wake of the 2016 election.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Was it fair that they let Facebook take all of the heat? And would they have gotten more scrutiny if they had remained independent?"

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm so glad someone asked this because this is, this is one of the big benefits of being owned by Facebook. If Instagram was not owned by Facebook, you would have seen Kevin Systrom testifying in front of Congress alongside Facebook and Twitter.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  And instead, what you got in November of 2017, I think you were also there, Casey. Facebook has this big announcement that 125 million people have seen content from Russia that may have misled them ahead of the election. And maybe like 15 minutes into the hearing, a senator asked like, what about Instagram? And they were like, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess there was like 16 million on Instagram, too. And then it's not until the 2018 Senate report that we realize in a broader way just how intensely Russia used Instagram, that they were building influencers there, too, and using them to to shape our opinions, get black people to think that it wasn't worth

• 40:02Speaker 02

  it to vote, get feminists to think that Hillary Clinton was a bad feminist. Like, all of the ways that that we see influencer marketing work, Russia was using to try to manipulate us on Instagram. And so I think that, yeah, Instagram would definitely have more of a reckoning, not just for that, but for all of their other issues. And it's it's really strategic that they have kept Instagram in this protected from I say strategic because I've talked to people in the communications organization who tell me that they strategically don't answer questions about Instagram, or in the past, they have not. So so I think like, they're very good at maintaining their brand image, and that's not a mistake.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Right. Rob from Business Insider wants to know if you can share an anecdote from your reporting that you found particularly interesting or entertaining, but didn't make it into the final cut of the book.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Oh, OK. So so I talked to talked to Ray Dalio, who was a mentor of Kevin Systrom. And he told me what it was like to mentor Kevin and about the thinking of, you know, after you leave, what should you do? And Ray was was the one who really convinced him to do nothing or just spend some time.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Reflecting, "Stop being so type A, stop worrying about that kind of thing." The other thing I really wished that I'd included, I went to Brazil and I went to Lollapalooza with a bunch of Brazilian influencers and it was just wild. Like, I'm like in this caravan with them, they all have perfect hair and makeup, they're teaching me the Brazilian words for like trying too hard on Instagram. We get there, we're in this like glass-walled corporate branded tent, it's muddy and raining outside, but the influencers don't mess up their outfits at all, they stay in this tent. And all of these fans are like pressing their faces against the glass to get a better look

• 42:06Speaker 02

  and it just really, it was like the moment where I was like, okay, Instagram is like a global phenomenon and maybe some places more than the US. It was really crazy.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Wow, that sounds like a really good time. You mentioned Kevin taking some time off from, you know, the tech world or sort of getting back to work, but just within the past couple of weeks, we've seen him and Mike come back with a new collaboration.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you haven't seen this, you can go to the website, it's rt.live and it's an attempt to determine essentially at what rate is the coronavirus spreading in every state in the Union. What did you make of their comeback project?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  I thought that it was, it really like spoke to a lot of the same themes that I saw in working with them. Like Kevin doesn't shy away from things that he, he's not a statistics guy, he doesn't have a background in statistics, but he got obsessed with it and probably read every book that he possibly could to put this project together. He's not an epidemiologist, but again, he's like, "What is the way that I can make this into something very simple so that you could look at it and you could do one thing?" And that's what Instagram is supposed to be. It's supposed to be this place where you look at it and you do one thing and you do it really well and then that's, that's kind of it. It doesn't have like, you know, groups and events and all of these other appendages that you see on Facebook.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  And, I mean, I hope it's helpful to people. I don't, I don't know enough about epidemiology to say whether it's super useful or not, but what it's supposed to do is it's supposed to help us understand when we start to reopen parts of the US. Is it safe to do, does that number, the reproductive rate of COVID go up? Or the expected infection rate of COVID go up? So I, I, I think that, yeah, it's great to have a resource like that. And of course, Kevin and Mike are working together, which speaks to a really rare, close working relationship among founders in Silicon Valley. You've heard all the dramatic stories, but these guys are still really good, really good friends.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, Andrew Bylin wants to know, do you think Kevin has ambitions to launch another competing social platform that will challenge Instagram or Facebook for relevance?

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Maybe. I, I wouldn't put anything past them. I mean, I think that whatever they do next, they'll probably do together. I know that like Kevin, like I said, has had many various interests. Like he's, when he first was quitting Facebook, he was learning to fly planes. I actually couldn't tell you the most likely thing he's going to do next. He, he's like, tries to sort of see himself as like a Renaissance man.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Right. Dustin Allen or Allen wants to know, what are the chances that regulatory bodies will force Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp to break up?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  The more they wait, the more they entangle. And that's really what's going to make it tough. I know you've written about, a lot about this in your interface newsletter, Casey. But, but this is, this is really like what's happening behind the scenes right now. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, they're tying together all of the messaging products so that if you are on one platform, you can message the other and vice versa. They're also working more together on e-commerce, all these other ways that you might make Facebook into not just a quote unquote, family of apps, but like a mega network.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Where Zuckerberg thinks that the more value that we can get out of Facebook is if it's bigger, if we have more connections to people who could help us in whatever we want them to help us on.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I'm sort of with you. I think the longer this drags on, the less likely it is. Antoine asks simply, did Instagram save Facebook?

• 46:03Speaker 02

  I think it's it's saved them in terms of relevance with a young population and saved them in terms of relevance with with famous people. And I think it really helped them with advertisers because Instagram had this premium product where you could show off a lifestyle. Facebook was more about direct response advertising. This is maybe two in the weeds, but it was more about direct response advertising, like billboards, basically, trying to get people to do stuff, optimizing for a certain action. And Instagram was more about brand. And I think that a big, any big advertiser wants to do both.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. We'll give the final question to Tim, who asks, looking at today's landscape of social networks, do you think anything has the potential to be the next Instagram?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Everyone's obsessed with TikTok right now. And if there's any place that's the the next Instagram, especially as we're all quarantined, we're tuning into more live video, even on Instagram, TikTok has become a very powerful force in our culture, whether it's through through dancing, or food, or comedy. The question is, I mean, they've already think, I think, very much surpassed Vine in the national psyche. But the question is whether they'll be allowed to continue in that direction, given their Chinese ownership. And that is also a question for regulators.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, fantastic. Well, the book is wonderful, No Filter, The Inside Story of Instagram. Sarah, where can people find this book and devour it?

• 47:43Speaker 02

  You can buy it anywhere you buy books. I know Amazon might have the hardcover on delay, but it's also on Audible, also as an ebook, in any form. But I would really encourage you right now to take this as an opportunity to support your local bookstore, because with their doors closed, they're trying to still stay afloat as a business and pay their employees through online sales. So if there's a bookstore you love, I would say, give them your business if you can.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Amen to that. Well, congratulations on the book. I think it's fantastic. If you care about Facebook or Instagram, it's an incredible yarn with a lot of just amazing reporting in it and very well told. So I do encourage everyone to check it out, just as I encourage everyone to check out The Interface, my daily newsletter, which you can find at theverge.com-interface, where I talk about Instagram and all the social networks. I want to thank everybody for joining us during this wild time in America. Hopefully it was interesting to you. It certainly was interesting for me. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  And we will see you next time on The Interface Live. Good night, everybody.

• 49:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, that was Casey Newton and Sarah Frier talking about her book, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. What a great conversation. We're going to be doing more of those. We're going to try to do some Vergecast lives. We're poking at what we can do, different kinds of technologies, different kinds of live events over the internet. If you've got ideas, tweet at me at MattReckless. If you have people you want us to talk to, tweet at me. Always interested in your feedback. We'll see you later this week with the chat show. Thanks.

• 49:35Speaker 03

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