During a Senate subcommittee hearing, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said, the company will bring back chronological feed in 2022. In 2016, Instagram announced that it will be showing algorithmically sorted feed and later on in 2017, it added recommended posts to the timeline of the users.
However, the personalized feed, based on users’ activity is widely disliked by users who want to see their friends’ posts in a timely manner.
Mosseri made the announcement during an investigation by the Senate Subcommittee on Child Safety on Instagram.
After the whistleblower, Frances Hogen revelation, Instagram and its parent company Meta, formerly Facebook, have come under deep scrutiny over the latent impact of their services on mental health and safety of teenagers.
Confirming the update, Instagram posts a series of tweets on Twitter. “We want people to have meaningful control over their experience. We’ve been experimenting with Favorites, a way for you to decide whose posts you want to see higher up, and we’re working on another option to see posts from people you follow in chronological order.”
“We want to be clear that we’re creating new options — providing people with more choices so they can decide what works best for them — not switching everyone back to a chronological feed. You can expect more on this early next year,” the company added.
During his testimony, Mosseri proposed the creation of an "industry body" that would determine best practices in handling children's data and parental controls to help keep children safe online. He suggested that the body can receive input from parents, regulators and civil society to create universal standards and safety.
It may be recalled that the photo and video sharing app was planning to bring kids specific version of Instagram. In September, it dropped the plan as it started gaining negative remarks for the community.