Instagram 10th birthday: how the social network has changed the way we view the world – and ourselves

Ten years ago today, two software designers launched a photo-sharing app that would irrevocably change the way we live and capture our lives, and absorb information.

Instagram, then an app designed for “photo-nerd hipsters in San Francisco” as co-founder Kevin Systrom put it, appealed to the masses, far surpassing any ambitions the founders had. Instagram now boasts a billion monthly users, and a cultural grip over society that Systrom and co-founder Mile Kreiger could never have planned.

On its tenth anniversary, Instagram exists in the minds of many as a happy-go-lucky app compared to some other social media platforms. Despite this, it has dealt with its own struggles to curtail the darker elements of society. Experts fear it can’t control the conspiracy theories and misinformation that are becoming widespread, as users exploit the platform’s algorithms and circumvent moderation.

But its influence is more than its failings. The app has had a distinct impact on culture, including defining what is visually pleasing for much of society and launching the careers of countless influencers,

Instagram’s cultural legacy

Instagram has influenced our day-to-day-life like few before it. Its billion users analyse the world around us for aesthetics that will do well on the platform, and feel incomplete if an event isn’t immortalised on its grid. They go in search of scenes designed for an Insta-ideal picture; companies design their restaurants and bars to try to get on users’ profiles for grassroots marketing – we’re all in a never-ending game of trying to win at the platform’s metrics of success through likes, tech journalist and author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram Sarah Frier pointed out.

“It’s hard to exaggerate how deeply Instagram has impacted our lives,” said Sara Tasker, the UK-based author of Hashtag Authentic: Finding creativity and building a community on Instagram and beyond.

Of the many impacts the app has had, her favourite is the push it’s given to us to be more creative, “from the mum who feels like it gives her permission to photograph her latte art, to the hotels, bars and restaurants spending big budgets on click-appealing interiors and super-shareable spots.”

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Instagram’s influence has grown measurably in past years too, after Facebook bought the app in 2012 and made a series of well-calculated decisions and outright copycat moves. Instagram Stories, a rival to Snapchat; Messenger; IGTV; and now Reels, hot on the heels of TikTok, have ensured that theoretically, if you only downloaded one social media app, it could be Instagram. It does the job of WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube – although it’s yet to prove it can outmuscle TikTok.

“I think it’s now just become like a part of life. It’s the main platform that I use to communicate with my friends and my family now,” said Omoyeme Akhigbe (@autonommy), an augmented reality developer and the creator of many popular Instagram Stories filters.

“We message each other on Instagram, video call through it. To me it’s become much more than just one platform where I post real-life pictures.”

The rise of influencers

For those who understand the platform intuitively, Instagram has the potential to provide a living for users, and earn them a level of fame that can open doors in other industries. It’s now familiar for influencers to transcend brand deals in which they are paid to promote products to actually set up their own companies, become actors, and write books. Many of these people would never have accessed those routes without it.

Instagram uses a currency for success that we’ve not seen before, said Tasker. Users are rewarded for their creativity, ability to appear natural onscreen, or even simply existing as an interesting person. “In a world of increasing automation and redundancy, it’s interesting to consider that these are all skills that cannot be replicated by any amount of AI,” she said.

While novel, these metrics are intentional, Frier argued. “I think I think it’s worth noting that while Facebook and Twitter have always said, ‘oh, we’re just neutral platforms, we’re just a place for people to to come share whatever they want to say’, at the very start, Instagram’s founders had an idea of what good Instagram content looked like.”

She pointed out that the Instagram Explore page – the page where random content from across the platform is suggested to users – used to be human-curated before an algorithm replaced it. Those people decided what kind of behaviour to reward and set out the template for what was popular, whether that was cute dog pictures or #foodporn.

The dark side of Instagram

Now the app is flooded with people replicating those models over and over again, in the hope of breaking out and finding success in the attention economy. Years later, is there any hope of that for normal people?

Fears of influencer saturation on the app are unfounded, Lucy Moon feels. A content creator and host of pop culture podcast The Sunday Social, she predicts a rise in popularity for micro-influencers, as users search for figureheads to follow in more and more niche areas of interest. “Influencers and the industry around them aren’t going anywhere,” she said.

Naturally Instagram’s roadmap to viral attention has its own downsides, with users, including micro-influences, adopting it for concerning purposes. A recent Atlantic piece highlighted the rise of QAnon influencers on the app, disseminating the dangerous fringe conspiracy theory through pastel graphics and pretty images, which had already become a popular format on the app. These figures are using the platform’s cute culture against it, whether knowingly or not, weaponising aesthetics to radicalise others.

The explore page’s algorithm has only become better at predicting what its users want to see, too, and at giving it to them, whether that’s coffee art and cute dogs or conspiracy theory content.

Its dark side, as yet, hasn’t made much of a mark on public consciousness as that of sister app Facebook, however – and at 10, its algorithms remain as influential as any on how we live – and see – our lives.