Instagram's making your algorithm public. I don't care if it's in the terms, it's not part of the deal.
People may not realise what Instagram is revealing about them on the 'Friends' tab
I discovered recently that an old friend has likely suffered a horrendous personal loss. I sincerely hope she’s doing ok.
It doesn’t feel appropriate for me to reach out, as I’ve only guessed this based on what Instagram is showing me.
This isn’t something she’s personally posted about. I found out from the ‘Friends’ tab.
The ‘Friends’ tab in Reels was introduced in Sept 2025. It shows the reels your friends have liked. Before it, the ‘likes’ pattern on Instagram was easy enough to internalise. For years, when you saw that a friend had liked a post, it was always something you had a connection to — a mutual follow, a comedy account, a celebrity. It felt like shared territory. Seeing the ‘like’ rarely felt like a revelation, more like a ‘Oh they’re into that too!’.
Friends Reels has broken that pattern, and it feels like a massive breach of trust. What the Friends tab surfaces has nothing to do with me, my interests haven’t been brought into the equation. This feed is one hundred percent about them. It feels like Instagram is showing me their algorithm.
And this wasn’t a one-off. In the past few weeks the same tab has revealed a friend’s partner is unhappy in their relationship, a family friend who is liking racist jokes they’d never say in person, and there’s many more. I can see there could be positives argued — perhaps a chance to start a conversation or at least not be in an echo chamber. But the point remains I don’t think these people realise their likes are being broadcast in this way.
An algorithm can be intensely personal. Our likes can in fact show our dislikes, our dreams, our flaws, they can reflect what we’ve lived through, what we’re afraid of, what we want, what we resent, perhaps what we’re trying to work through in private. A sudden flurry of them can often indicate what’s going on in a person’s life at that moment. Most people would be mortified to have their ‘For You’ page project on a screen in front of an audience. For all our concern about big tech knowing our secrets, we still expect it to keep them from each other.
I have no doubt Meta’s terms and conditions cover this. So legally, nothing is wrong. But it’s highlighted to me the unwritten contract users form with a platform based on past experience. The contract is written in the thousand small expectations they’ve built up from daily use. When a UX pattern a user has lived inside for years suddenly shifts and reveals more of them to the people around them than it used to, that’s a breach of trust, even if it’s not technically a breach of contract.
