Instagram says human reviewers, not AI, caused recent moderation issues

On Friday, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri addressed recent problems that affected Instagram and Threads and resulted in account deletion, lost posts, and other problems. Mosseri stated in a thread that the company had “found mistakes” and blamed them on human moderators rather than the AI systems, as some had speculated.

Subsequently, in a Threads post, Mosseri noted that the mistakes were from content reviewers who were “making calls without being provided the context on how conversations played out, which was a miss.” He assured users that Instagram is developing solutions to the problems to ensure that moderators make fewer errors.

Mosseri also said in a comment on Threads that“one of the tools we built broke, and so it wasn’t showing them sufficient context.” He added, “That’s on us.”

Despite this explanation, some issues are still ambiguous. Some of the users complained that their accounts were blocked and labeled as belonging to users under 13 years old. Despite providing ID verification, some of the users said they were unable to regain access to their accounts.

Instagram also told that not all concerns were due to human errors and that cases of underaged flagging were still being investigated.

Other accounts mentioned they got the account disablement, and also stated that they found their posts were downranked or being identified as spam when the users are genuine and have a lot of followers.

Former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg observed that there was a dramatic reduction in activity on Threads; social media strategist Matt Navarra also pointed to a dramatic decrease in Threads’ follower growth and engagement.

During these challenges, Bluesky, another social networking rival, seized the opportunity to gain customer satisfaction by advertising its features on Threads.

Mosseri agreed that there was a long way to go in making the platform safer and that more had to be done, stating, “We’re trying to provide a safer experience, and we need to do better.”He concluded his message by asking for patience, indicating that the full resolution may take time: “Thanks for your patience, and keep the feedback coming.”