The head of Instagram says social media needs more context thanks to AI

In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri says that users should not trust the images they see online because AI is “obviously generating” content that is easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social media should help with that.

“Our role as online platforms is to label AI-generated content as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but admits that “some content” will be missed by those labels. As a result, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much they can trust their content.

Just as it’s good to remember that chatbots will confidently lie to you before you trust an AI-powered search engine, checking that posted claims or photos come from a trustworthy account can help you consider their authenticity. At the moment, Meta’s platforms don’t offer much of the kind of status Mosseri posted about today, although the company recently revealed major changes coming to its content rules.

What Mosseri describes sounds close to user-led moderation like social notes on X and YouTube or Bluesky’s custom screening filters. Whether Meta plans to launch anything like that is unknown, but then again, it has been known to take pages from Bluesky’s book.