Instagram wants Gen Z. What does Gen Z want from Instagram?

SAN FRANCISCO - How badly does the photo-sharing app Instagram covet young users?

On June 12, it introduced the most expensive brand campaign in the app’s history, according to Meta, and it is squarely focused on Generation Z.

“We’re 15-years-old now, and I think one of the core challenges we face is: How do we stay relevant?” Mr Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in an interview.

The campaign, a series of digital advertisements and billboards featuring stars like musicians Rosalía and Tyler, the Creator, casts Instagram as a launchpad for scrappy creative types. (As opposed to, perhaps, a social media behemoth whose owner, Meta, is facing a landmark antitrust trial.) It is just one way in which Meta is acting on its long-simmering anxiety that Instagram risks being written off by a younger generation that expects a looser, less manicured social media experience.

“It’s just a lot less pressure posting on TikTok,” said Ms Sheen Zutshi, 21, a college student in New York. She uses Instagram to send direct messages to her friends, but sees it as a more curated option – the sort of place where someone might earnestly post a photo of the night sky, like her older cousin did recently. “It’s just really cute, because she’s a millennial,” she said.

Instagram is the third most widely used social media site among teenagers, behind YouTube and TikTok, according to a 2024 report from Pew Research. In a survey conducted this spring by investment bank Piper Sandler, nearly half of teenagers said they considered TikTok their “favorite” platform.

In interviews, a dozen members of Gen Z, ranging in age from 15 to 26, said they still used Instagram to keep in touch with friends, scope out crushes, build businesses and pore over cooking videos, despite worrying at times about the app’s effects on their mental health. But out of all of its features, they seemed least interested in the polished, public photo feed that had once been Instagram’s marquee offering.

“Most of my friends have, like, maybe one post on their account,” said Ms Sophia, 15, a high school student in Arlington, Virginia, who downloaded Instagram last month in order to join a group chat for a study-abroad program.

She summed up a paradox for the photo-sharing app: Gen Z enthusiastically uses Instagram for a host of purposes, just not for its original one. That poses a challenge for Meta, which has for years tried to enhance its appeal among young people while being pummeled by critics over concerns about its apps’ safety for younger users.

Mark Zuckerberg once worried about the cachet of Facebook, the platform he founded in 2004. “We have data that many people see Facebook as getting less relevant and believe our best days are behind us,” he wrote in an email to other leaders in 2018. The email was among the exhibits presented by the Federal Trade Commission in its antitrust trial against Meta, which began in April and is awaiting a ruling from a federal judge.

Soon, corporate anxieties about relevance shifted to Instagram, the younger, chicer app whose acquisition for US$1 billion in 2012 is a focal point of the case. By 2020, an internal strategy memo obtained by The New York Times cautioned against letting Instagram’s teen audience slip away. “If we lose the teen foothold in the US we lose the pipeline,” it read.

More than a dozen state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, accusing the company of prioritising engagement over the welfare of young users. The company was publicly pilloried by whistleblowers including Frances Haugen, who testified before senators in 2021 that the company had deliberately kept children hooked on its services. Facing an outcry, the company said it would pause development of an Instagram Kids app that would be tailored for children 13 and younger.

Instagram introduced Teen Accounts last year that came equipped with stricter privacy settings and more supervision tools for users under 18. In the interview, Mr Mosseri said the features had received positive feedback from teenagers, though they had modestly dented growth and engagement among those users. “I mean, it’s not debilitating, but at least in the short run, it hurt,” he said.

To hear Mr Mosseri tell it, the new campaign is not some canny effort to juice engagement among young people; it is an attempt to respond to a “paradigm shift” in the way Gen Z already uses Instagram.

In a post on June 12, Mr Mosseri said the app would test new features aimed at making the platform feel lower-pressure, including a way to quietly add a post to one’s profile without blasting it out to every single follower. And he announced a new program, called Drafts, that would offer creators creative and financial support.

Won’t any splashy rollout targeted toward younger users still raise eyebrows among the company’s critics? “I don’t think this is at odds with the work that we’re doing to keep Instagram safe,” Mr Mosseri said.

No matter how magnanimously Instagram describes its product updates, its goal is usually to keep people on the app for longer and longer, said Mr Zamaan Qureshi, a founder of Design It For Us, a nonprofit that pushes for policy to protect children and teenagers online.

“Young people see through this stuff,” Mr Qureshi, 22, said. He added that two previous Instagram rollouts – of Stories and Reels – had been immediately clocked by young people as knockoffs of other apps that were successful at retaining the attention of their age group.

Those features have nonetheless been popular among young users. And Instagram has benefited from its relative stability in a chaotic social media landscape, said Ms Jennifer Grygiel, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University. TikTok’s future in the United States is uncertain. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter plunged the platform into chaos. And Facebook is still “totally uncool.”

Instagram may not electrify Gen Z, Grygiel said, but “it’s become a weird default, for better or for worse.”

Many of the young people who use Instagram said it lagged behind TikTok as an engine for pop culture – but that did not stop them from habitually checking it anyway. Several said they were engaged in near-constant negotiation to try to enjoy the app’s connective properties without sacrificing too much of their time or privacy.

Ms Violet Paull, 18, a college student in Massachusetts, was frustrated enough by the app’s hold on her attention that she deleted it in March. Scrolling often made her feel insecure about her own life, especially when fitness influencers declared the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic a “perfect time to start working out and get really skinny,” she said.

She has felt happier without the app, she said. Then she arrived at her internship for the summer, and everyone exchanged Instagram handles. NYTIMES