Instagram's boss says he's 'disappointed' that Selena Gomez deleted the app from her phone
Instagram's boss Adam Mosseri has revealed that he was "disappointed" to learn actress Selena Gomez deleted the Instagram app from her phone â but said her experience can't be equated with the average user.
Gomez has 152 million Instagram fans, meaning she is the third most-followed person on the platform behind footballer Christiano Ronaldo and singer Ariana Grande. Last week, the actress said on a morning talk show that she got rid of the app on her phone for her own wellbeing.
"It's just become really unhealthy, I think personally, for young people including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all these comments and letting this stuff in, and it was affecting me," said Gomez, who has been a vocal critic of social media's effect on mental wellbeing in the past.
"It would make me depressed. It would make me feel not good about myself, and look at my body differently, and all kinds of stuff," she said. Gomez said she periodically logs on to her account from other people's phones.
Speaking to BBC Radio 1 "Newsbeat," Mosseri said he was "disappointed" to hear Gomez had deleted the app, but caveated it by saying Gomez is not your typical Instagram user. "She has over 100 million followers, it's a whole other world," said Mosseri.
"We need to make sure that creators like her are getting value out of the platform, that they don't get depressed by the platform," he said, but added that the tools Instagram needs to build to protect teenagers from things like bullying are "very different."
Nonetheless, he said he would "love to hear" from Gomez about what she thinks can be done to improve the platform. "We like the criticism, we like to have the conversation," said Mosseri.
Mosseri admitted that Instagram has not kept up with the deluge of harmful content that has proliferated on the platform. "We were under-focused on the downsides of connecting people. Technology is not good or bad â it just is," he said.
