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Content quality
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On Instagram, content quality concerns whether a post is valuable or interesting to viewers, whether or not it is AI-generated.1 Meta says Instagram may show low-quality posts to fewer people even when they do not break its Community Standards, subject to people's controls over what they see.2 Meta patents and Facebook engineering accounts illustrate ways to assess quality beyond apparent popularity, account for differences in people's ratings, and consider linked pages, but do not establish how Instagram currently works.3456 For creators, Adam Mosseri's advice puts entertaining, informative, inspiring, authentic or relatable content ahead of production polish; he also recommends uploading high-quality video files.78 In August 2026, Mosseri said Instagram's goal is to help people find content they are excited about, not simply content they watch.9
Quality depends on what viewers value
Instagram’s content-quality judgments do not divide neatly between AI-generated and other material: Mosseri said in December 2025 that both can include valuable and low-quality content.1 He acknowledged that Instagram was not yet as good at ordering AI-generated content for viewers as it should be.1 In August 2026, he described a broader difficulty in finding worthwhile material: opening access to people with interesting ideas or taste also creates a noisier environment without traditional gatekeepers.9
Low quality can reduce distribution
Instagram’s treatment of low-quality content belongs to Meta’s broader “remove, reduce, inform” strategy, which Meta’s Transparency Center says it has used since 2016.2 For Facebook, Meta’s Transparency Center connects quality-related incentives for creators with its goal of providing interesting, new material over the long term.10 A Meta patent describes a possible mechanism for making objectionable content less prominent: compare indicators, such as evidence of misleading information, with set thresholds and use the result to determine how far to lower a post’s position.11
Create for viewers before production polish
In August 2024, he recommended matching presentation to the story and brand, noting that high production value can work against a creator’s goals.12 His September 2024 spotlight on artist Coy Sun illustrated purposeful editing: keeping the subject in the same position between shots helped maintain attention, while close-up views and intimate audio brought viewers into the work.13 For video uploads, Mosseri recommended in December 2024 using at least 720p resolution and 30 frames per second, meaning 30 individual video images each second.7 He explained that a higher-quality incoming file helps Instagram deliver a better-looking video to viewers.7
Apparent popularity is not the same as quality
Meta research and patents. These may not describe how Instagram works today.
A Meta patent approaches content-quality assessment by distinguishing useful or interesting posts from low-quality material that nevertheless appears popular.6 A Meta patent describes examining a post’s characteristics, calculating an estimate of its quality, and using that estimate when choosing posts and deciding their order.6 Meta’s engineering team describes a related problem in Facebook’s News Feed: automated systems estimate which posts will matter to each person and how that person might interact with them.3 Meta’s engineering team says Facebook combines those predictions using what people say they consider meaningful, connecting automated estimates of quality and interaction with judgments about long-term value.3
Accounting for differences in people’s ratings
Meta research and patents. These may not describe how Instagram works today.
A Meta patent addresses another difficulty in using people’s judgments to assess content quality: different individuals can rate similar posts differently because of their own rating tendencies.5 The Meta patent describes comparing each person’s ratings with ratings across the group and adjusting them so that those tendencies do not distort the resulting quality scores.5 The Meta patent then uses the adjusted ratings to teach an automated system to estimate a post’s quality from its characteristics.5
Assessing a post and its linked page together
Meta research and patents. These may not describe how Instagram works today.
A Meta patent extends content-quality assessment from judgments about a post itself to the question of how much its linked destination should influence its overall score.4 The Meta patent considers the quality of both the post and the external page, but gives the destination’s quality less influence when the post itself receives a low score.4 This approach in the Meta patent prevents a poor post from receiving a high overall quality score, and therefore a prominent position, solely because it links to a good page.4
See also
References
- 1How does @mosseri think about AI content on Instagram?
- 2Reducing the distribution of problematic content
- 3How machine learning powers Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm
- 4Adjusting quality scores of external pages based on quality of associated content
- 5Determining normalized ratings for content items from a group of users offsetting user bias in ratings of content items received from users of the group
- 6Content quality evaluation and classification
- 7AMA: what quality setting should I export videos at before uploading to Instagram?
- 8Focusing on creating authentic and relatable content is often more important than production value.
- 9slop is in the eye of the beholder full pod with @mosseri out now on apple + spotify watch on patreon
- 10Types of content we demote (Content Distribution Guidelines)
- 11Systems and methods for demotion of content items in a feed
- 12High production value isn’t a must, in fact it can even work against you depending on your goals.
- 13Spotlight: @koysun is an amazing letter artist out of San Diego who is as detail oriented with his videos as he is with his design work.