Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the company has been working on 'a version' of the feature for months. He murmured that “we're currently working on a version of a chronological feed that we hope to launch next year,” Mosseri said, adding that the company has been working on the feature “for months.” He didn’t share additional details about how such a feed would work but said that the company is “targeting the first quarter of next year” for a launch.
Instagram used to have a chronological feed along with Facebook was changed to an algorithmic one making sure that the most relevant posts are shown. While people didn’t like that change, the two social media giants from Meta never changed.
For more than five years, Instagram plans to bring back “a version” of its chronological feed next year, the company’s top executive said on December 08. Speaking to lawmakers at a Senate hearing on Instagram and teen safety,
Mosseri said that he supports “giving people the option to have a chronological feed.” Blasting off an option for a chronological feed would be a major reversal for the photo-sharing app, which has consistently defended its algorithmic feed despite persistent complaints and conspiracy theories from users about how their posts are ranked. “
On a post, Mosseri wrote that a chronological feed made it “impossible for most people to see everything, let alone all the posts they cared about.” He said the chronological feed resulted in people “missing” a majority of the posts in their feed in 2016. He further mentioned that he supports providing people with an option to sort posts chronologically. And right after that, the same was announced on Twitter by Instagram’s PR Team.
Mosseri was still in favor of the algorithmic ranking as he even went on to say that by 2016, People were missing 70% of all their posts in feed, including almost half of posts from their close connections and that’s why Instagram came up with an algorithmic feed that ranked posts based on the choices and preferences of users. Since then, Instagram has faced even more scrutiny over how its algorithms rank and suggest content, particularly for teenagers and younger users. Congress has also been debating legislation to rein in social media platforms’ ranking systems, including a proposed bill that would regulate “malicious” algorithms.
It is currently testing another change to feed: the addition of “suggested posts” from accounts you don’t follow into the main feed. Developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi also recently spotted a feature that would allow users to sort their feeds by “home,” “favorites” or "following," though it’s not clear if any of those refer to a chronological feed. This reckless change of mind may hint towards some of the problems that algorithmic feed may have brought with it, most prominently, misinformation.
Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen also argued a lot in favor of a chronological feed, as it would not be promoting older posts hence limiting the spread of misinformation and it would also be free from any algorithmic bias.
A post from Instagram’s PR Team doesn’t seem to mean that the app itself will be adapting the chronological feed, rather it may probably just give a choice to users who want to go back into the good old days. However, how this change is going to be implemented will be revealed only when the algorithmic feed is reintroduced next year.
