Muse, the AI agent from Meta, can do many wonderful and useful things. It can help organize your inbox, book travel plans for you, and buy you lunch.
But one thing that Meta has decided it shouldn’t brag about is that it can track who unfollowed you on Instagram.
About a week ago, Rachel Karten, who writes the excellent marketing newsletter Link in Bio, noticed a strange ad on Instagram. The ad encouraged people to download Muse, with an image of the fuzzy mascot holding up red and green Tinder-esque signs, suggesting you could “See who unfollowed you each week.”
Finding out who unfollowed you on Instagram is something people have wanted to know since the app first launched. But Instagram — for good reasons — has avoided making this a feature on its own app.
I reached out to Meta to ask about this seeming clash, and a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the ad had been removed and is no longer active in the Meta ad library.
Instagram doesn’t want you to know your unfollows
Here’s the tension: Instagram knows that people want this feature, but it also knows it would be bad for the platform’s vibes.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri regularly does AMAs on his personal account, and he’s answered questions about why there’s no “who unfollowed me” feature. His reasoning (gone from his page but have been aggregated in other videos) is that they want to make people feel comfortable unfollowing people they’re no longer interested in.
To most people, it is obvious that this feature could hurt people’s feelings, especially younger users (let’s assume that Instagram does care about teen users’ feelings here, although I understand if you have some hesitations on that). Feeling bad while using the platform is a bad user experience!
It’s also ultimately bad for Instagram. If you’re reluctant to unfollow accounts you don’t like, then you’ll end up with a feed that’s less compelling, and you’ll end up opening Instagram less often or spending less time on it. That’s bad for Instagram’s daily active user metrics!
Yes, Muse can actually do this
There are, and have been, third-party services that can track who unfollows you. These sometimes require access to your login info in ways I definitely wouldn’t recommend, and can track over time who has unfollowed you. So it’s not like Muse is doing something totally novel or unheard of here.
I asked Muse to do this for me, and it said it could — with a caveat: it will start tracking my follow lists to see who unfollows me going forward, but it can’t retroactively check who unfollowed me in the past (that’s mostly the same as the other trackers). And honestly? I don’t want to know! No thanks! Yikes!
Business Insider
Is this just one stupid ad? Yes. Was it set up and run as an ad by someone at Meta far removed from Instagram’s philosophy on unfollows? Probably. Is it the most shocking news in the world if Meta runs a single ad and then takes it down? No.
But this interests me so much because it gets at a bigger and thornier issue. AI agents like Muse are what Meta clearly sees as the future of the company and how people use its services. But AI agents’ abilities and use cases may be at odds with the nature of social media.
In the simplest way, AI agents are supposed to help you be efficient and get things done. Social media is supposed to help you waste your time.
These are two vastly different objectives — and it’s going to be interesting to see how these two new technological pillars of Meta clash or complement each other.
Already, we have one Meta product (Muse) that is more than happy to do something that another Meta product (Instagram) has long discouraged.
There are plenty of other features that people want to do on social media, but Instagram and Facebook don’t allow because it’s bad for the overall health of the platforms. Suddenly, AI agents like Muse can do these long-forbidden things. The question is: how far is Meta willing to cannibalize the health of its own social platforms for the sake of growing its AI?
